Section I. The Liberal System; the Evangelical System; the High Church or Catholic System
1. ‘See!’ exclaims the Liberal, taking his view of this English orthodoxy from that side on which it presents itself as the antagonist of change and improvement, ‘see what a hopeless class of people these old pillars of the Church are! How can it stand if it is to be supported by such maxims as these? Is not everything moving about us, and can we determine to remain stationary? Opinions upon every subject are undergoing revolution, and we think that our Articles and Formularies can be kept as they are? How can you be so foolish as not to perceive that the Dissenters will grow upon us, and ultimately overwhelm us, unless we discover some scheme for comprehending them? And then there is that body of Romanists in the midst of us; why are you determined to look upon them as if they belonged to the days of Gregory the Seventh or Innocent the Third? Why not make them your friends, by assuming that they are so? Why not throw overboard your prejudices, and enter at once and heartily into the spirit of the age?’
2. In quite other language did the Evangelical complain of the spirit which animated the members of the old school; ‘They have lost sight of all spiritual influences and realities: a dry notion of human merit is at the bottom of all their thoughts and teachings. They expect men to get to heaven by being baptized, and by leading good and respectable lives; the principle of faith is forgotten altogether. The power of the Gospel, as a message of peace to man, is not felt or regarded. Another bond of union than that of spiritual fellowship with Christ is set up; hence holy Dissenters are denounced, ungodly Churchmen fraternized with. Restore the doctrines of the Articles; preach the Gospel in season and out of season; this is the only way to improve the condition of things among us, to remedy the mischiefs which the indifference of the last age has produced.’
3. ‘Alas!’ cry those members of the English Church who wish to be called Catholics, ‘miserable comforters are ye all. It is true that our English orthodoxy is very bad; you Liberals and Evangelicals will introduce something which is a thousandfold worse. The error of those whom you attack is, that they thought they were members of a nation rather than members of a Church; that they were to follow the maxims of their own day, and not recall the maxims of better days; that they were to look up to the State as their guide and authority, instead of feeling that the State has an object altogether different from ours, that at certain happy moments under some godly princes, it may conform itself to our teachings, but that habitually, and at this time above all others, it is our jealous foe, and aspires to be our tyrant. The Church is a body which may combine with a State, or rather, submit to it, but which has no natural connexion with it. It has divine sacraments, an apostolic order, a power of binding and loosing; the practice and rules of the age of the Fathers are her model; to these she must be ever seeking to adapt herself. She must reject communion with the Dissenters in this country, not because they want the privileges of the State, but because they have cut themselves off from the universal Church; renouncing her orders, counterfeiting her sacraments. She must, in like manner, repudiate those Protestants abroad who have separated from and abandoned their succession; she must aspire after union with the orthodox Greeks and Latins, but must be content to wait till we or they are prepared for this union. At home we must labour to assert the worth of sacraments, to introduce discipline for the purpose of preserving baptismal purity in our children, and giving repentance to those who have lost it; of cutting off those who hold schismatical or heretical notions under the garb of Churchmen. We must stir men up to a more exact and religious life, encourage them to do good works, and to expect heavenly rewards for them. We must urge our disciples to retirement from the world, to penances and mortifications; we must preach repentance as the only way of recovering the privileges of Churchmen, which were given once, but which most men lose through sin; we must discountenance every exercise of private judgment, except in the matter of choosing teachers; we must advise our disciples to be content with probable conclusions, as all that faith requires, and bid them leave certainties to men of science.’
Section II. Reflections on These Systems, and on Our Position Generally
These are the main outlines of the three systems which offer themselves to the deliberation of the young English theologian in the present day. He is told by the supporters of each that he must embrace one or other of them. All his attempts to incorporate them into each other have been very vain. It seems prodigious arrogance to invent a scheme of his own. He feels that he cannot fall back upon the old State Churchmanship.
This fear of arrogance is surely one which we ought to encourage in ourselves, and in every other person. If we had had more humility, we should probably have much fewer difficulties to encounter than we have. And therefore I would say, if I had any chance of being heard, Let us try by all means to be humble. And that we may not be otherwise, do not let us hastily set ourselves up to condemn any of these systems, or those who propound them. Our consciences, I believe, have told us from time to time that there is something in each of them which we ought not to reject. Let us not reject it. But we may find, that there is a divine harmony, of which the living principle in each of these systems forms one note, of which the systems themselves are a disturbance and a violation. This seemed to be the case in our previous inquiries respecting Protestant bodies and the Catholic Church; let us see whether our own national Church presents an exception to the rule, or an illustration of it.
1. How much does every true heart respond to that assertion of the Liberal, that if our Church be indeed a living body, it cannot be tied down by the system of a particular age; it must have an expansive power; it must breathe and move; it must be able to throw off the results of partial experiences: it must be able to profit by all new experiences! With what sympathy do we listen to him, when he says that the Church is meant to comprehend and not to exclude; that neither Protestant Dissenters nor Romish Dissenters should be out of the range of its sympathies, or should be prohibited from sharing in any portion of its benefits! And, now, how would he accomplish his beautiful conception? He proposes to us that we should abandon the prayers which we have derived from ages gone by, and the Articles which have come down to us from the Reformation; or he would have us adapt these to the maxims of our own time. But what if those Prayers should be the very means by which we have been preserved from the bondage to particular modes and habits of feeling, when they have been threatening to hold us fast? What if those Articles have kept us from sinking into a particular theological system, and have compelled us to feel that there were two sides of truth, neither of which could be asserted to the exclusion of the other? What if the abandonment either of the Prayers or the Articles, or the reduction of them to our own present standards of thought, should bring the Church into the most flat and hopeless monotony, should so level her to the superstitions of the nineteenth century, so divorce her from the past and the future, that all expansion would for ever be impossible? Again, how would he accomplish his projects of comprehension? He would take away this and that thing about which we and the Dissenters differ, till at last he discovered a few common principles upon which we might all agree. But what if the peculiar doctrines and practices of each class of Dissenters be those in which their most living feelings are expressed? What if all plans of comprehension have failed just because the best and most earnest men were those who saw most the importance of that which was to be given up? If these suppositions should be true, we must look somewhere else than to a liberal system, to produce the effects which Liberals have dreamed of.
2. With what truth and power do the words of the Evangelicals come home to us;—that the loss of faith was the great misery of the last age; that outward acts usurped the place of life-giving principles; and that, therefore, outward acts were poor and dead; that if a vital glow was restored to any part of the Church at the close of the last century, it came from the feeling that God had interfered on behalf of His creatures, and was interfering on behalf of them still; that there is a real relation between the creature and the Creator; that there is a real power coming forth from the Creator to succour His creatures, and to enable them to do His will! What mighty words are these! How important it must be, as the Evangelical says, that all men should hear them, and be brought to act upon the conviction of their truth!
And how is this hope to be realised? Go forth and tell men that their baptism is not an admission into the privileges of God’s spiritual Church; that they are not to take this sign as a warrant of their right to call themselves members of Christ, and to pray to God as their Father in Him. Go and tell them that they are not in a real relation with God, but only in a nominal one; go and tell them that if they are ever to enter into that relation they must bring themselves into it by an act of faith, or else wait till an angel comes down and troubles the waters; go and tell them that the Eucharist is not a real bond between Christ and His members, but only a picture or likeness, which, by a violent act of our will, we may turn into a reality; go and make these comfortable declarations to men, and mix them well with denunciations of other men for not preaching the Gospel; thus you will fulfil God’s commission; thus you will reform a corrupt and sinful land.
3. What a charm lies in the words of the propounders of the Catholic system;—that there is indeed a Church in the world, which God himself has established; that He has not left it to the faith and feelings and notions of men; that He has given us permanent signs of its existence; that He has not left us to find our way into it, but has Himself taken us into it; that being in it we are under His own guidance and discipline; that we are not bound to prove ourselves members of it, by tests which exclude others who share the same privileges with us; that we are not bound to form ourselves into circles and parties and coteries; that we belong to the Communion of Saints, and need not ask for another! What good tidings, amidst all the confusions of our political parties, to hear that we are not the slaves of any of them; that we can do without the State’s money, or the State’s sword; that we have powers of our own, which the State did not give nor can take away!
And as to practical matters, how evidently true we feel the assertion to be, that men ought to be called to repentance, and to do good works, and to restrain themselves, and to offer sacrifices to God! How clear it seems, that the Evangelicals, though they may wish most heartily to press these duties upon their flocks, are practically unable to do so; that they cannot bid the members of their congregations generally, ‘Arise and go to their Father,’ because they will only allow that a portion of them may call God their Father; and because that portion of them, according to their doctrine, has already repented and turned to God; that they cannot call the members of their congregation generally to do holy acts from holy principles, because they do not believe that the majority of them have received the Spirit, from whom all holy desires and just works must proceed.
But how great then must be our confusion and dismay, when we discover that the preaching of repentance and of good works, is just as impossible, upon the Catholic system, as upon the Evangelical; that the congregations of the one are to be treated practically as if they had lost their baptismal rights, just as the congregations of the other are to be treated as if they had never obtained them; that repentance and moral discipline are to be held forth as the possible means of recovering a treasure, not as the fruit of shame for the past, and precaution against the future abuse of it; that exhortations to good works, therefore, must of necessity take a selfish form, and be confirmed by selfish sanctions! After all those splendid assurances, that the Church really exists, and that it is endowed with such mighty powers, how grievous it is to find the most strange uncertainty about the terms under which she exists; whether only as a splendid dream, whereof the record is preserved in the writings of the Fathers, and which may some day be realised; or as a potentiality, which was made a fact during the Middle Ages by the supremacy of the Pope; or, lastly, as an invisible equatorial line between Romanism and Protestantism; a line, of which some dim traces may, from time to time, be discovered, with the help of powerful glasses, in our English history, but which has gradually been lost in the dark ground upon one side of it. And, finally, to men who have left the intolerable pride, and the real slavery, of those notions about private judgment, which have been of late current among us, how painful is the discovery, that these Catholic denouncers of it do in fact justify the most extravagant, self-conceited, and unreasonable use which has ever been made of it; and only condemn it when it has lost its evil character, and is actually exercised under moral discipline and government! For what can be more subversive of all order and government, what so direct an outrage upon fact, as the assertion, that men in general are left to choose their teachers? And what so subversive of the very idea of a teacher, as the notion that he is not to cultivate the mind and judgment of his pupil, but only to pour into him certain notions of his own? The very arrogance from which we wish to deliver men, is the notion that they are not to receive the teachers, the parents, judges, pastors, whom God has set over them. The very hope we wish to encourage in them is, that if they receive humbly the light which is vouchsafed to them, it will be increased to them more and more, till they are brought into the perfect day.
And, lastly, the dogma respecting probable evidence, which the Catholic school make the foundation of their intellectual, as the dogma of baptismal purity is the foundation of their moral teaching, seems to contain the very virus of that scepticism which they denounce in the Liberal. The Liberal says, ‘Nothing is certain in morals; one opinion may be less mischievous or more plausible than another; but, as to the thing which dogmatics call truth, sensible men, who know anything of history, have discarded the dream of it altogether.’ And what says our English Catholic?—‘We admit nothing is certain in morals; but then we do not want certainty. We are so faithful and submissive that we are content with appearances and likelihoods; we receive what we are told by the authority which we have determined to be on the whole the best. God has not willed that we should have more light.’ I appeal to the conscience of mankind against this language. Do we not mean when we use the awful name of God, ‘The Being, He who Is’? If there be no certainty, how dare we take that name into our lips? Are not the very words, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ an assertion that there is something fixed and eternal upon which the pillars of the universe rest? Do not the next words mean, ‘He who Is has revealed Himself to us’? We are not to live upon probabilities and plausibilities. He who is Truth does wish that we should know the truth, and that the truth should make us free.’ I do therefore say, that this system, so far as it stands upon the doctrine of probabilities, begins in scepticism, and that in scepticism it must terminate.
It will be observed that I have not charged the authors of these systems with the tendencies which they commonly impute to each other. I have not said that the Liberal wishes to substitute Rationalism for Orthodoxy: that the Evangelical wishes to establish the principle of Dissent; that the Catholic systematiser wishes to introduce Popery. My charge against each is, that he defeats his own object. As to the question how far these different accusations are true, I should feel obliged in many cases to give a double answer in order to make myself intelligible. I can quite understand that each of these parties believes the clear and strong assertion of its own principle to be the best preservative against the very evil which it is supposed to favour. And I think this is a true and reasonable opinion. I think the Liberal has a right to say, ‘Recognize the idea of Rationalism in the Church, and it will not assert itself out of the Church in the form of Infidelity.’ That the Evangelical has a right to say, ‘Recognize the idea of personal faith as the condition of Christian fellowship in the Church, and it will not assert itself in the form of Dissent out of the Church.’ I think the Catholic has a right to say, ‘Recognize the idea of Catholicism in your Church, and it will not assert itself out of the Church in the form of Romanism.’ But while I acknowledge this, and therefore can enter into the feelings of disappointment and indignation which each in turn experiences when he finds that his purpose is not understood, I must say also, that it seems to me evident both from facts and reason, that each of these principles, when it is worked into a system, does become fairly obnoxious to the complaint of those who denounce it most vehemently. I cannot see what Church Liberalism reduced to a system is but the denial of anything as given to men either in the shape of Tradition or Revelation; what Church Evangelicism reduced to a system is but the denial of the very idea of Church fellowship or Unity, and the substitution for it of a combination of individual units; what Catholicism reduced to a system is but Romanism; that is to say, the direct denial of the distinction of National Churches, and the implicit denial of the Church as a spiritual body holding a spiritual Head. And it seems to me a false way of speaking to say that each of these systems is good in moderation, but when pushed to its extreme is bad. I do not think the system is the extension or expansion of the principle, but its limitation and contradiction. I do not see how the principle can be carried too far. I do not see how anything can be done towards the formation of the system, without introducing a seed of evil which must germinate till it produces all its natural fruits.
I have written very much in vain, if I have not yet explained why I suppose this must be the case. These systems, Protestant, Romish, English, seem to me each to bear witness of the existence of a Divine Order; each to be a miserable, partial, human substitute for it. In every country, therefore, I should desire to see men emancipated from the chains which they have made for themselves, and entering into the freedom of God’s Church. But it seems to me, that in England we have a clearer witness than there is anywhere of our right to this emancipation, and of the way in which it may be effected. This system building is not natural to us. We have evils which are natural to us, and against which we have to be continually on our guard. But this is an exotic product: one of the charges which the Liberal and Evangelical and Catholic systematisers make against our native English divines is, that they have little understanding of any systems; that they go on in a blind mechanical course, merely caring to keep their places and do their work. And yet the members of all these parties are continually giving proof, when they are not occupied with actual controversies, that they feel this maxim of “keeping their places, and doing their work,” to be not a low or grovelling one; but one which their consciences testify in favour of, and to which they would wish, if they could, to conform themselves. As they become more aged and holy, more disciplined by affliction, more apprehensive of God’s will and of the ends which they are to seek, it would seem as if this old-fashioned notion, which struck them as so vulgar and earthly in their youth, is more and more acknowledged to be one high in its origin, and difficult in its realisation. An old systematiser in England is a very rare spectacle indeed. There is either a gravitation into some lower region, or an ascent into some higher one; either a fall out of the middle air of speculations to our mother clods; or a clear perception that the heavenly things are substantial, and that in the solid earth and not in the clouds we are to find the images of them. I should be very presumptuous if I spoke to such men, except in the language of deference and humility, beseeching them not to make us that which they have ceased to be themselves; not to let us fancy from their words that they belong to schools and parties, when we know that in their closets and in their lives they must be renouncing them all. It is from the ranks of young men that these parties will be recruited. They want, as they say, principles and ideas. They cannot move on in the line of mere practical business and exertion. They must know why they act and what is the end of action, or they will not act at all. I think I am as sensible of this necessity as they can be; and sensible, too, how little their elders are able to sympathize in the want, or to satisfy it. Nay, I think I can see further, that unless we who are younger do earnestly seek after principles and grounds of action, we must sink into the monotony of the last century, or into a far worse state than that. I believe the great principles, which each of these systems has developed, have been made known to us for the wisest purposes. But then I think that they are the sap which is to invigorate and restore the oak trunk which has been standing for so many ages on our soil, and that the seedlings which they themselves have sent forth, are of a poor, weak, tortuous growth, not capable of resisting any tempest. I do not urge the young English student to make light of these principles; I say he cannot with safety make light of any one of them. All belong to him, he has need of them all; but I beseech him to consider solemnly, and as in the presence of God, whether he may lawfully do any acts which imply that he adopts one of the systems in which these principles are buried, and whether he dares to fraternize with any parties, as parties, which profess them.
He will be told, of course, that to stand aloof from them is practically impossible; that to attempt it is an act of self-conceit and self-will; that he is an Eclectic or a Syncretist; that in a short time if he perseveres in his determination he will throw off his faith altogether. To the first charge he may reply, that it cannot be impossible for an Englishman to be that which it is the natural bias of an Englishman, not under some peculiar influence, to be. To the second he will answer, that instead of rejecting the instructions of his parents and teachers, he is seeking to hold them fast. Possibly they belong to a particular school. His first impulse on beginning to think, is to emancipate himself from their notions, to choose new teachers, to adopt the system which is most opposite to that of his education. Those who beseech him not to join a party say, ‘By no means do this; the notions which you have learnt must not be abandoned. There is a truth in them which you must have; never let them go till you have made yourself master of it; when you are master of it, do what you like with the system; you will love those who taught it you more than you ever did; you will only not suffer their teachings to keep you separate from men whom you ought also to love.’ The accusation of Eclecticism or Syncretism it is better not to notice at all; nine out of ten persons who use the words, do not know what they mean; they are merely bugbears to frighten children with; the tenth man who does know will understand that he who endeavours to substitute a Church for systems, must regard with most dread and suspicion the attempt at a complete, all-comprehending system. Hating all systems, he hates those most which are most perfect, because in them there are the fewest crannies and crevices through which the light and air of heaven may enter. He hates the Romish system more than all Protestant systems, because the latter are inconsistent and fragmentary, the former is all-embracing and satisfactory, therefore more lifeless, inhuman, godless. As to the fear of his losing his faith, when he has thrown down the party walls which have been raised for the defence of it, he may venture to stand the risk. If his faith be in the doctrines of men and not in the wisdom of God, the sooner it falls the better. If it be in Him whose name is Truth, to Him be the care of it committed. We believe that His sentence has gone forth against systems and parties; we do not believe that He has recalled the words, ‘None who trusteth in Me shall be confounded.’
I am sure our responsibility in this matter is becoming more weighty every day. I have said that these systems are not natural to us. But I do not mean that they are not able to assimilate themselves with our most characteristic tendencies. Elsewhere the defenders of a system may merely form a school. In England, because by constitution we are politicians and not systematisers, they must form a party. The moment we have adopted a peculiar theory we begin to organise. We have our flags and our watchwords, our chiefs and our subordinates. All the generous feelings of sympathy and courage, of readiness to support a friend, of unwillingness to desert him when he has done some unpopular act, bind us to one and another maxim which our leaders or allies have put forth, even though there is nothing in our own minds which answers to it; we throw the feelings befitting men of action and soldiers, into the defence of propositions which have been worked out by the most dry school logic. Thus personality necessarily enters into all our solemnest discussions. A noble symptom of what we ought to be! a miserable effect when we are striving to make ourselves something else! The respectable champions on each side ask, and ask again, why they should be treated with harshness and malignity, for maintaining principles which they believe in their hearts to be charitable and true. Immediately after, their Newspapers and Reviews are seen generously striving that no other party shall have the stigma of being more unfair and libellous than their own. What seems to me worse and more grievous still—all, whether they are capable of understanding systems or not, are expected to enlist in one of these parties, and to bear its name. The poor must be instructed in penny tracts to call such a man a Papist, or such a man a Low Churchman. Our children must become polemics before they can repeat their catechism; and the members of that sex which exists to pacify and harmonise society, to be a witness against our cold logical habits of thought, to teach us the worth of things above words, must talk about opinions, imitate our discords, pollute their minds if not their lips with the ribaldry which we think it a part of our Christian duty and profession to indulge against those who are called by the same name and partake of the same sacraments with us. Surely such a state of things must bring down heavy judgments upon our Church and land, and therefore everyone ought to consider whether he will make himself an accessory to the sin, whether he can do nothing to avert the punishment.
I am aware how much pains the defenders of party have taken, to engage the practical feelings of Englishmen on their side. They have said, ‘Let theorists talk what they will, the moment we begin to act, we must associate with some men or other, and this association will assume a party character. To bid us abandon parties and systems, is only another way of bidding us hang down our hands in stupid indolence. Those who wish to do anything must be content to take things as they find them.’ Yes, this is undoubtedly the right test; I rejoice that we should be brought to it. I leave it then to the defenders of systems and parties, to explain what they are doing with them. They cannot complain that their machinery is not in active operation. It may occasionally meet with a little obstruction from a certain vague impression in men’s minds, that they have been commanded to love their neighbours as themselves; still they cannot be so ungrateful as not to acknowledge that it has been brought to very tolerable perfection, and of course, to very great efficiency, in this nineteenth century in our English towns and villages. Any description of its results from an opponent could not be a fair one. I will therefore confine myself to a short statement of certain modes of action which I believe are open to a person who does not avail himself of this machinery, but is content with the powers which he believes God has bestowed upon him, as a minister of His Kingdom.
1. Does such a person find himself among the members of different sects and parties—a Quaker here, a Baptist there, a Unitarian on his right, a Plymouth Christian on his left? He believes that he is a member of a polity which recognizes the truth contained in each of these systems; but they have made a system out of some principle which they have torn apart from the rest; that they have destroyed that principle by its separation. He believes that there are earnest men in these sects who are feeling this to be the case, who are catching at all schemes of union because they feel it, who are angry with us because we do not enter into their sense of the necessity of a union and therefore fraternize with them; who are proclaiming the very principle upon which the Catholic Church stands, that all unity is to be in Christ, and that intellectual notions and opinions ought not to divide men from Him. There is therefore a practical renunciation of the sect-principle, as something which is no longer tenable. There is at the same time a very furious desire to maintain it as against the national Church. The reasons will seem to him to be these. First, the Church has put itself forth merely as an English Church. Its character as a Catholic body, as a kingdom set up in the world for all nations, has been kept out of sight. Secondly, in the reaction against this tendency, it has taken a negative, i.e. a sectarian, character. The idea of the Church, as a united body, has been put forth, chiefly to shew the wickedness of those who have separated from it. Its episcopacy and its sacraments have been looked upon chiefly as exclusive of those who have them not. Above all, the spiritual character of the Church as deriving its life from its head, a character which the Dissenters are especially disposed by their profession to recognize, has been disjoined from the institutions which embody it. Men have been asked to receive these institutions merely as such, and then to hope for spiritual life through them. Little attempt has been made to prove to them that the institutions are themselves living portions of the divine kingdom. A person therefore who has entered into these convictions himself, will not despair of seeing all the true hearty Dissenters gradually receiving them also. He will not be impatient to force any notions of his own upon them. His desires will be to meet their feelings and to enter into them. He will be most anxious not to destroy anything which they have received or learnt; to confirm them in their feelings of affection and reverence for their fathers; to strengthen in them by all means the hereditary affections, which their doctrines respecting private judgment so much impair. He wishes to preserve all the faith which they have from the destruction which is threatening it; to unite their faith with that of those from whom they are separated; to make them integral members of the body from which they fancy that it is the object of our pride and selfishness to exclude them. What the result of such a method may be, is in God’s hands, not ours. At all events other methods have been tried and have failed; this has not been tried.
2. Or does the Churchman I am supposing find himself in one of our awful manufacturing districts? Of course, the sense of his own utter inadequacy to deal with the mass of evil which he meets there is the first which will take hold of him, and will grow stronger every day. Yet he is there, and he knows that there is One who cares for this mass of living beings infinitely more than he does. Nay, his own coldness and heartlessness will continually remind him that if he is to care for them at all, the feeling must be communicated to him by Him who often seems to these unhappy creatures utterly heedless of their sorrows and complainings. And then he has the consolation which the Athenian orator found when he reflected on the reverses of his countrymen, and the resistless march of Philip. ‘If we had done such and such things and they had failed, we might despair; we have not done them, therefore let us hope.’ A Church which was looked upon, and almost looked upon itself, as a tool of the aristocracy, which compared its own orders with the ranks in civil society, and forgot that it existed to testify that man as man is the object of his Creator’s sympathy; such a Church had no voice which could reach the hearts of these multitudes. The Liberal proclamation which says, ‘Teach them; impart to them a few of the things that we know,’ was more genial and humane. But there are thoughts ever at work in these Englishmen, in these human beings, thoughts quickened by hunger and suffering, which such instruction could not appease. More impressive far was the speech of the Methodist and the Evangelical: ‘You have immortal souls, they are perishing; oh! ask how they may be saved.’ Such words spoken with true earnestness are very mighty. But they are not enough; men feel that they are not merely lost creatures; they look up to heaven above them, and ask whether it can be true that this is the whole account of their condition; that their sense of right and wrong, their cravings for fellowship, their consciousness of being creatures having powers which no other creatures possess, are all nothing. If religion, they say, will give us no explanation of these feelings, if it can only tell us about a fall for the whole race, and an escape for a few individuals of it, then our wants must be satisfied without religion. Then begin Chartism and Socialism, and whatever schemes make rich men tremble. Surely, what the modern assertors of a Church system say about the duty of administering active charity to these sufferers, of shewing that we do not merely regard them as pensioners on the national bounty, but as fellow-men for whom we are to make sacrifices—surely this language is far more to the purpose. Surely if acted upon even imperfectly, it must produce most happy effects. But how would the proclamation to our Chartists and Socialists, that they had baptismal purity once, and that they have lost it now; that they must recover their ground by repentance, by prayer and fasting; that they must submit to discipline, and be deprived of privileges which they never exercised nor cared for; how can such a proclamation as this meet any of the confused, disorderly notions which are stirring in their minds, or set them right?
On the other hand, if the new and unwonted proclamation were to go forth, ‘God has cared for you, you are indeed His children; His Son has redeemed you, His Spirit is striving with you; there is a fellowship larger, more irrespective of outward distinctions, more democratical, than any which you can create; but it is a fellowship of mutual love, not mutual selfishness, in which the chief of all is the servant of all’—may not one think that a result would follow as great as that which attended the preaching of any Franciscan friar in the twelfth century, or any Methodist preacher in the eighteenth? For these are true words, everlasting words, and yet words which belong especially to our time; they are words which interpret, and must be interpreted by, that regular charity, that ministerial holiness, those sacraments, prayers, discipline, of which the Catholic speaks. They connect his words about repentance with those of the Evangelical, making it manifest, that nothing but an accursed nature and a depraved will could have robbed any of the blessings which God has bestowed upon us all. They translate into meaning and life all the liberal plans for the education of adults and children; they enable us to fulfil the notion, which statesmen have entertained, that the Church is to be the supporter of the existing orders, by making her a teacher and example to those orders respecting their duties and responsibilities; by removing the hatred which their forgetfulness of those duties and responsibilities is threatening to create in the minds of the lower classes.
3. But a Churchman, such as I have supposed, would be both compelled by his circumstances, and urged by his principles, to change these convictions into action, by enlisting all the wealthier inhabitants of his parish in different services and occupations for the benefit of their inferiors. I am unwilling to enlarge upon this subject; first, because my practical ignorance makes me unfit to offer any suggestions upon it; and, secondly, because I am certain that our English political wisdom, guided by Catholic feeling, is already doing much in many parts of this land, in the accomplishment of such a design. I must, however, refer to it for the purpose of remarking, how the notion, that party organisation is necessary, is at once explained and refuted the moment we aim at an ecclesiastical organisation. It is explained when the truth, that no man is meant to work alone, which is the truth that is implied in this strange maxim, is made the principle of our action. It is refuted; for we find how infinitely freer from friction a society is which is held together by sacramental bonds, and is moving under the direction of an appointed pastor, than all societies constructed upon a party model, or acknowledging a party motive, ever have been or ever can be. For the one seeks to preserve all existing ranks and relations, the other sets them all aside. The one is continually endeavouring to understand how the middle classes may be brought most to act upon the lower, so as to be their guides and not their tyrants; how the upper classes may be brought to act upon the middle, so as not to be their fawning slaves and at the same time the betrayers of their consciences at elections, cold and distant and the objects of their servile imitation at other times; how each portion of the community may preserve its proper position to the rest, and may be fused together by the spiritual power which exists for each, the minister of all, the creature of none. The other confounds all orders, and yet does not the least diminish their mutual repulsion, or make them feel that they have a common object. Above all, the Churchman is ever longing to discover how the handmaidens of the Church may be brought to do her the services which they alone can do, without departing for a moment from their own true estate, as wives, as sisters, as mothers; how the whole sex may be an order of Sisters of Charity; and how, in each particular neighbourhood, this order may be at work in lowliness and meekness, softening and healing the sorrows of the world. The partisan acknowledges no difference of vocation in man and woman; all are to be equally feverish and restless; careful about many things, unfit alike for quiet contemplation or regular activity.
4. Again, let us suppose our Churchman in Ireland, amidst a population, the majority of which acknowledge no relation to the body of which he is a member; how would he feel, and how would he desire to act? Would he not think thus within himself?—‘When Anselm came over from his Norman convent to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and his victorious countrymen thought that he of course would look upon the old Saxons of the soil as they did; he told them plainly, that a Churchman acknowledged no distinctions of race, and that his vocation was to be the friend of the poor and distressed wherever he met with them. And these principles, of course with great exceptions and deviations, were acted upon by a large portion of the Norman bishops and clergy. What was the effect? We grew up to be an English nation. The Saxon serf felt that he had a portion and a right in the soil; he recollected the sounds of his native language; he began to speak it; in due time the conquerors and the conquered became one. If our Churchmen had but acted upon this principle in Ireland; if they had but said to the English settlers,—We will have nothing to do with your Orange lodges and your hell-fire clubs, except to discipline and restrain those who belong to them; we are come over as protectors of these Celts; we are to raise them out of barbarism; to speak to their Church feelings and their national feelings; to call forth both together:—if these had been our maxims, how many problems, which perplex the statesman at this day, might have been solved long ago! But that phrase, The English interest, was continually present to the minds of the statesmen who sent out our Bishops, and though they might often stumble by mistake upon a noble rebel to their commands, they sought diligently for men who should forward their own narrow policy. What has been the consequence? The national feeling in Ireland has strangely and unnaturally associated itself with that Romanism which is the foe of all national feeling. The Irish look upon our Church as a Saxon Church, and they actually fly to Rome to give them an Irish Church. But even now at the eleventh hour, if better and truer feelings of our position are rising in the minds of statesmen, may not the Church be the means of carrying them out? We have tried what the mere preaching of Protestantism will do in Ireland, and so far as it has been earnest and sincere, it has not been in vain. But still it has not touched the hearts of Irishmen; there has been a resistance to it, not merely in their bad feelings but in their good. State liberality has been tried. So far as it has been the token of kindness and sympathy, perhaps this too has not been in vain. Still all must acknowledge that it has done very little; most men think that a fair proportion of evil has been mingled with the good. But if there be a sympathy between the Catholic and National principle, if they cannot really exist apart, why may we not begin to speak to the national sympathies of Irishmen; to speak to them as members of an Irish Catholic Church; to declare that every Irishman ought to look upon himself as a member of such a Church, and not of any other Church, Saxon or Romish; to make it manifest by acts, that we hold our revenues for the good of the whole land, and that it would not gain anything but misery by the confiscation of them, or by the extirpation of those who possessed them?’ Such thoughts, I say, are likely to arise in the mind of an Irish Churchman, who enters into the principles I have endeavoured to develop. They may be very crude, but still they may be the germs of acts which neither the State nor the Church will have reason to complain of.
5. To one who feels the importance of the Protestant principle, and that its true home is in the Catholic Church, it must needs seem a strange providence in respect to England, that she should have on one side of her a nation in which Protestantism has tried to exist nakedly and exclusively; on the other side, a nation which wishes to be Catholic by being Romanist. Each experiment is, I think, very decisive, but each is connected with sins which we have need to confess and deplore. The utter insufficiency of Presbyterianism to support a national life has been surely proved by the example of Scotland. But we began with setting up our episcopacy as if it were an English thing. We gave the Scotch people the notion, that their own kings were coming back to reduce them into an ecclesiastical province of England, and the religious as well as the national spirit rose against such a pretension. Now, it would seem as if the episcopalian body in Scotland had the opportunity of shewing, that they are neither members of a religious sect nor tools of England. They have existed for many years without any State patronage; their chief fault has been, that they have not sympathized with the feelings of the people, that they have stood too much upon their ecclesiastical dignity, that they have seemed too much mere anti-presbyterians. But if, in the present crisis of Scotland, they will consider earnestly, that they exist as witnesses, not of a system but of a Church, not of certain notions about episcopacy, but of episcopacy as part of the constitution of Christ’s spiritual kingdom; they will find, I think, that they may exercise a quiet and soothing influence over that ferment of Scotch feelings, which all State contrivances have been so utterly ineffectual to allay. They will not, I hope, look with proud aristocratical contempt upon the earnest cry which the people have sent forth to be freed from civil dominion. They will not, I hope, indulge in mocking allusions to the proud language in which Presbyterianism used to assert that it was free of this control. They will acknowledge that spiritual freedom is most essential to the life of a nation. They will labour to shew, that the Church, rightly and truly constituted, is able to humble the lofty and to exalt the lowly; that the tyranny which Presbyterianism granted to its aristocracy at the time of the Reformation, is the tyranny against which its sons are groaning now; that its boast of being a Church for the poor has ended in a sadder separation between the poor and the rich than has almost ever existed in any country. Here again I am suggesting no projects or plans to Scotch Churchmen. I am merely urging them to consider seriously the indications of God’s will, and to desire that they may act in accordance with it.
6. The lessons which we have derived from the history of our connexion with Scotland and Ireland (I have spoken before of those which are suggested by the circumstances of our old colonies in North America) cannot surely be lost upon us when we go forth to plant new settlements on the other side of the globe, or when we are inquiring how we are to deal with those which we possess already. Every circumstance of their position and of ours seems to say, ‘See that you do not merely establish an English kingdom in those soils; if you do, that kingdom will not be a blessing to the colonists, to the natives, or to the mother country. See that you do not merely send forth preachers in your ships to tell the people that all they have believed hitherto—if they have believed anything—is false, and that we hold a doctrine which sets it all aside. See that you raise up in the midst of them what they shall feel to be as real a kingdom as the one which is presented to them in the persons of governors and judges; a kingdom which does not only deal equal justice to natives and to settlers, but which claims both alike for its citizens, endues both alike with its highest privileges; a kingdom which comes to subvert nothing, but to restore that which is decayed and fallen; to adopt into itself every fragment of existing faith and feeling; to purify it and exalt it; to cut off from it only that which the conscience of the native confesses to be inconsistent with it; to testify that wherever there is a creature having human limbs and features, there is one of that race for which Christ died, one whom He is not ashamed to call a brother.’
In such countries as New Zealand and Australia, such a testimony as is borne by the establishment of a Christian kingdom of peace and righteousness is everything; for there, of course, only the rudest and most incoherent spiritual theories and speculations will be found to exist. In India the case is altogether different; yet there, more than anywhere, is it needful that the signs of a spiritual kingdom should be introduced, that Christianity should be regarded as something more than a fine theory. For how did the simple tenets of Mahometanism prevail over the complicated creeds and philosophies of the Hindoos but because the former came forth in the shape of an organic society, and the latter were only forms of thought connected principally with the physical universe? The Christian Church ought to understand the positions both of the Hindoo and the Mussulman, in respect to the strange masses of feelings and opinions which are exhibited in the traditions of the one, and to the struggle after consistency and unity which are visible in the actual history of the other. Would that the supporters of Indian missions had taken this ground when they were assailed by the cowardice and indifference of the merchant-emperors thirty years ago! Would that they had been able to reply to those who had accused them of disturbing the faith of the natives, and so endangering English dominion—“No; it is your godlessness and rapacity which endanger their faith; you are making them infidels while you pretend to indulge their superstitions: we go to save their faith by delivering them from their superstitions and your example; we go, that England may not perish in that day when she shall be called to give account of the crimes which you have committed.” But it was not fully understood at that time that Christianity was anything else but a sect, or a collection of sects, sent into the world to displace Pagan and Mahomedan sects; therefore, the years which have followed have produced their natural effect, and we have now to deal for the most part with a generation of open or disguised infidels. Still the good men of that day, guided by a higher wisdom than their own, were led to ask strenuously of the English legislature, that a Bishop might be sent out to them. They felt that they wanted a Church. A heart was put into a country which had hitherto only been directed by wise heads or skilful hands; a heart which is still beating, and which we trust may yet send a life-blood into every part of that vast empire. The issue is with God; but He has taught us by sufficiently manifest indications in what way He wills that we should fulfil our part in the work.
7. I have not yet spoken of the spirit in which we should act towards the members of foreign Churches, be they Romish or Protestant. But enough has been said in former parts of this work to indicate the course which an Englishman, who is not tied down by systems, must strive to pursue in reference to them. What I have been chiefly wishing to shew is, that here we have the means of acting upon the principles which all men everywhere ought to act upon if they could; herein it seems to me lies the blessing for which we have to give thanks. Our Church has no right to call herself better than other Churches in any respect, in many she must acknowledge herself to be worse. But our position, we may fairly affirm, for it is not a boast but a confession, is one of singular advantage. If what I have said be true, our faith is not formed by a union of the Protestant systems with the Romish system, nor of certain elements taken from the one and of certain elements taken from the other. So far as it is represented in our liturgy and our articles, it is the faith of a Church, and has nothing to do with any system at all. That peculiar character which God has given us, enables us, if we do not slight the mercy, to understand the difference between a Church and a System, better perhaps than any of our neighbours can, and, therefore, our position, rightly used, gives us a power of assisting them in realising the blessings of their own. By refusing to unite with them on the ground of any one of their systems, by seeking to unite with them on the grounds of the universal Church, we teach them wherein lies their strength and their weakness; by determining that we will be a nation distinct from all others, we encourage each of them to be a nation distinct from us and from all others. By shewing them how our Church life and our national life are interwoven, we teach them that the bonds which make them one with us are necessary to the support of that peculiar character and position which make them independent of us.
But for such tasks as these—for reconciling the different sects in our own land, for dealing with the wild feelings respecting government and society which are abroad, for bringing the different classes into co-operation, for entering into the strong passions of Scotch Calvinists and Irish Romanists, for taming the savages of the antipodes, for restoring the strange reliques of ancient civilisation among the natives of British India, for suggesting any practical hints, or giving any practical help to our brethren on the Continent; what need have we of another discipline and another spirit than that which we seem at present to possess! Shall we obtain either the one or the other by sitting still, by affirming that these tasks are too great for creatures so infirm and fallen, by waiting for some sudden inspiration? This cannot be. These works are set before us; in one way or other, we are trying to carry them on, and must carry them on. The necessity is laid upon us; the only point to be considered is how we can support it. Do we tremble at the great efforts of thought which are presupposed in these outward undertakings, the careful studies in history, ecclesiastical and civil, the acquaintance with the powers and the distinctions of words as the signs of thought, the intimacy with the symbols which nature and art have furnished to the mythologist, the patient toil with which these must be weighed in our minds before we can cast ourselves into the feelings of other men, while yet we do not lose our own? Assuredly this is required of us, not the whole of each student—for the Church is one body, and hath many members—but something of every one, and the habit and disposition of all. But there is nothing in all this to stagger the countrymen of Bacon and of Newton. Study is painful and intolerable to Englishmen if they cannot connect it with action. They cannot pursue it for its pleasure or its comeliness; make them feel that there is an end in it, that it is necessary for their business, and they will be as diligent slaves in the reading of books as in the making of roads. Our systems and our parties have confused us in every direction; they lead us to fancy that all things are moving round in a weary circle, or are imprisoned in lifeless notions. At the same time they tempt every man to suppose that he is to be everything, and to know everything, and to do everything; for he feels that if he has not the whole of his system before him, each part of it becomes mischievous and false. And he cannot trust other men to do their work while he does his own; for he feels that he belongs to a party rather than to a Church, and therefore he has no security that each person has his orders and duties assigned to him. Thus we are at the same time indolent and overdiligent, ignorant and encyclopedic. Once break this spell, and we shall again begin to connect our specific studies with a general humanity, and so at once preserve their limitations and make them universal.
But there is another and the more serious subject. I have spoken of a different discipline, but we need a different spirit in order to that discipline. Not a different spirit from that which we received in our baptism, but an altogether different one from the spirit of party and of selfishness, which we have allowed to enter into us and possess us in our manhood. To exorcise this, that the other may really inform us and rule us, should surely be our first object. And we cannot drive it out of others until we have striven that it may be banished from ourselves. If we, who form the clergy of the land, believe that we are its heart, we must suppose that the purification of the body generally depends upon our purification; we must feel that every evil which we call upon others to repent of has its origin and root in us, and that we must repent of it first. I fear that the habit of apologising for our institution, when it has been ignorantly attacked by those who know nothing of its meaning or its blessing, may have operated injuriously upon our lives. We have defended the arrangements of Providence and the order of the Church, till, unawares, we have begun to defend ourselves, who have so grievously sinned against those arrangements and that order, and have hindered men from perceiving what they are. For this fault, if we have committed it, we must wish to make amends; since we must know that there can be no national confession or national reformation, if we, who ought to be the foremost in both, as having the most to answer for, are trying to make excuses for ourselves, hiding the evil which we are inwardly conscious of, or imputing it to circumstances, most of which are very favourable to us, none of which ought to be our masters.
But if shame and humiliation are needful for English clergymen generally, they must be especially needful in those who have presumed to speak of our sins, and to offer any suggestion for our amendment. It is too probable that they would have known nothing of the evil of systems and parties in others if they had not felt it in themselves; nay, that the irritation of the beam in their own eye has made them more eager to detect the mote in their brother’s eye. I have in this book attacked no wrong tendency to which I do not know myself to be liable. I am conscious to a certain degree, though very insufficiently, of the danger I am in of substituting the denunciation of it for the practical correction of it in the only sphere over which I have any control. I am not ignorant, also, that the hints which I have offered in opposition to systems may, themselves, be turned by myself or by others into a system; and that neither its weakness and inconsistency, nor the insignificance of its originator, may prevent it from connecting itself with some new party. I believe that some of whom I have spoken in this chapter began to fulfil their mission with as sincere a desire that their words might never become the symbols of a faction as I can feel now. I do not, therefore, confide in myself. But since a school, which should be formed to oppose all schools, must be of necessity more mischievous than any of them; and since a school, which pretended to amalgamate the doctrines of all other schools, would be, as I think, more mischievous than that, I do pray earnestly, that if any such schools should arise, they may come to naught; and that, if what I have written in this book should tend even in the least degree to favour the establishment of them, it may come to naught. On the other hand, if there be anything here which may help to raise men above their own narrow conceptions and mine, may lead them to believe that there is a way to that truth which is living and universal, and above us all, and that He who is Truth will guide them in that way—this which is from Him and not from me, I pray that He will bless. ‘Let all thine enemies perish, O Lord;’ all systems, schools, parties which have hindered men from seeing the largeness, and freedom, and glory of Thy kingdom; ‘but let them that love thee,’ in whatever earthly mists they may at present be involved, ‘be as the sun when he goeth forth in his strength.’