This November we begin to disuse what are called the State Services. I wish to tell you why I rejoice that the two Houses have asked the Queen to suspend the order which appoints them. That I may make this explanation, I must also tell you why I cannot sympathize in some of the reasons by which that step has been justified.
I shall not refer to the question of the authority upon which those Services stood. As a clergyman, I felt it no hardship to obey an Order of the Queen in Council. If they were National Services,—Services to bind the nation in one by recollections of the past, or thanksgivings for the present,—I know not from whom they could proceed better than from the Sovereign of the land. Ecclesiastical punctilios interfere grievously with ecclesiastical duties, and therefore, in the truest sense, with ecclesiastical power. They are for idle men, not for those who have a work to do. Many used the Services, while the command lasted, —not at all liking them,—out of mere loyalty. Still, if the consciences of any were disturbed on this ground, it is better that they should be relieved; in a thousand cases, what strike us as idle scruples, are so mixed with deep convictions, that we are bound to indulge the first, rather than wound the other.
Another motive for ceasing to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot, the Martyrdom of Charles, the Restoration, and the Revolution, has been assigned with great distinctness in the most influential public journals, and has, no doubt, been recognized as the true one by many of their readers. “We know,” it is said, “well enough, that the discovery of the plot was owing to the wit of Cecil; the death of Charles, to the victory of the army over the Parliament; the return of his son, to the intrigues of General Monk; the success of William, to the confusion and imbecility of James. Why refer any of these events to a Divine origin? Such language does not belong to our age; it is not the honest expression of our feeling. We have been forced by these Services, against our better judgment, to take up the tone of those chronicles, written in the infancy of criticism and philology, which referred all events to a supernatural cause, because the natural causes were unknown, or were wilfully overlooked.”
Assuredly all cant language, all language which does not correspond to the truth of things, and does not express the genuine convictions of those who utter it, is odious and mischievous. That there are passages in these Services which deserve that character, I am far from denying. I have more than once pointed them out to the congregation which meets in the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, believing that it was a duty to the cause of God and of truth that I should do so. But I have never admitted, nor can I admit now, that the error lay in their attributing ordinary events to God, in their introducing a too devout and habitual recognition of Him into our thoughts of our country’s history. My complaint of them is just of the opposite kind. I think they too much reduce the tone of history to the tone of the newspaper. I think they have encouraged those habits, from which a deeper awe and reverence of God, a more steadfast belief that He is working in the transactions of the world, would deliver us. The study of the past should help to raise us above the turbulent passions and low party-spirit of the present. The sense that we are under the same Divine government as our forefathers, should enable us to call them back to life, to feel that their deeds are not merely written in books, but have helped to constitute our actual England. I utterly deny that it is sound historical criticism, that it is profound philology, to trace events which have been the produce of a long past, and which are to bear fruit in a long future, to some petty accidents, or the contrivances of some cunning man. No writer of history is content to do that. If he despises the mythical ages, it is one of his pleas for despising them, that they did not know how to connect events together, that they referred them to no common law. He, on the contrary, is a philosopher; he sees into the meaning of things; he can show how one age has grown out of another. A very desirable faculty indeed, if it is not spent in mere phrases; if he does not invoke the spirit of the age like a necromancer, or substitute vague generalizations for living men. That he does this so often, drives many to the chronicler, who at least tried to record acts, if he understood the cause of them ever so little, or to the modern newspaper, which gives proper names and gossip, if it gives nothing else.
May it not be that the belief in One who was, and is, and is to come,—of an actual Lord over nations and men,—would save us from some of the temptations to which we are exposed, when we seek our history from any one of these classes? Might it not enable us to profit by them all? The old chronicler was apt to look for a Divine intervention in particular cases—for some breach of law, generally to favour the cause which he was advocating, or to crush its antagonists. He who believes that the King of kings is never absent from His dominions, is never for a moment forgetting those over whom He is ruling, may see in special crises the manifestations of His presence,—days of the Lord. But he will not suppose that what awakens men out of their lethargy is really more Divine than the Will that is moving and acting when they are in their lethargy. The startling event is to make them acknowledge Him who was in that place, though they knew it not. The apparition of the righteous Judge is not to give one part of the nation a triumph over the other, not to exalt one school or faction, but to make its members feel that they are one body, sharing the same blessings and the same punishments—to make them ashamed of their factions, afraid of continuing in them.
So, again, it would be impossible for a person really entertaining this faith, to look upon History as a dreary series of antecedents and consequents, such as one class of writers would make it; as a mere exhibition of heroic men exalted above their fellows, with a right to despise them, if not to trample upon them, such as it appears to another. With a Divine Will ruling all the course of the world, human wills must be the most wonderful parts of the study. How they have fulfilled their work, or refused to fulfil it; how they have understood it, or misunderstood it; must be the most earnest of all inquiries. No mere events can be contemplated without reference to these. And the historian, being well assured that the Will of God is for the manifestation of good and for the putting down of evil, will naturally be attracted to the best men, not to the worst; being convinced that he can only know the worst through the best, will naturally seek the good in each man rather than the evil, that he may hate the evil more. But he will have no preference for Titanic men, though he is bound to do them and their powers all justice. He is certain that order and government are what God designs for men. He is certain that no true man exalts himself above other men, but seeks to be in sympathy with them, and has power over them in proportion to his sympathy.
Thus also he is preserved from uttering oracles, like the newspapers, or from coveting their power. He cannot overlook the world as they do, believing that it is overlooked by One to Whom he can safely trust it; only desiring to understand a little of His ways in it. Thus the present will look as grand and awful to him as the past. The revolutions of his own day can be as little trifled with as the revolutions of former days; they too are the voices of God; they are days of the Lord. If he could keep that thought continually in remembrance, every fact would seem to him a wonderful and a terrible thing. To find out what it is would be worthy of all diligence; to pervert it for any purpose of himself or of his school would be a great enormity.
This transgression was, I think, sanctioned if not committed by our State Services; therefore I am thankful that we are rid of them. I cannot tell whether any Members of the Houses of Parliament had a liking for some one of them, but were content to abandon it that they might be delivered from another which they disliked. My own aversion is quite impartial. I as much object to the denunciation of Papists in the 5th of November Service as of Puritans in the other two. In each case I think the truth of history was sacrificed to ferocious animosities; that those animosities should have found their way into prayers and thanksgivings, changed the sin against man into a direct sin against God. To speak of them as confessions of sin is monstrous; they were confessions of other people’s sins not of our own. We denounced them; we were pure. What could be a greater perversion of the meaning of God’s judgments, than to say that the evils of the Stuarts’ reigns were owing to Papists and Puritans,—that Churchmen and Royalists were not guilty of them? If these were acts of repentance, all that we call repentance in our other Services means nothing. I do not say that we might not read the Services with a very deep sense of repentance; but it was by imparting a sense to the words which the words themselves do not convey; it was by mourning that some of those words should ever have gone forth.
It is, however, a serious question whether even this passionate partisanship is not better than the coldness to which it may give place. Many of us have perhaps at times asked ourselves if it would be quite safe to part with even the vulgarest Guy Fawkes procession, which kept a people in mind of their own past. We need not have wasted time in such thoughts; ceremonies do not quickly disappear; they survive the associations originally belonging to them: till they become positively mischievous, of course, no one would dream of putting them down. But some think that we should invent new commemorations; which might be lessons in history, bonds to the members of the nation, encouragements to trust in God. If they were likely to answer any one of these purposes, I do not think we can have too many of them, or can establish them too quickly. How good it might be to commemorate the signing of Magna Charta, if we could set forth to the people the history of that transaction; if we could use it to explain the meaning of Constitutional Government! But we must first believe in Constitutional Government; believe it as earnestly as that good and wise man does who is sentenced for it and for his love of England to a French prison; believe in it as a gift of God, as a reality; implied in the existence of parliaments, not created by them; often brought into disgrace by their misdoings. Such a belief I hope we shall some day recover, or rather that we shall hold it with a fulness of meaning with which it has not been held yet. But clearly it is not ours at present. People joke about Constitutional Government having been weighed in the balance and found wanting. They think Absolutism, on the whole, more convenient. If he can connect the Constitution with some party cry, it may be worth something to the Statesman; if he can connect it with some religious opinion, it becomes godly in the eyes of the Churchman: otherwise the first pronounces it obsolete; the second, “merely secular.” Such lessons all classes among us have learnt or are learning. The Aristocracy, who fought for the Constitution in old times, have come to identify it with some of its meanest accidents, or worst outgrowths; to think that when they defend them, they are defending it; when they are obliged to abandon them, that it must go. The Middle Classes, who owe everything to the constitutional principle, cannot ascertain that it adds materially to the trade of the country; why therefore should they preserve it? The Working Classes have not yet discovered what a deep and earnest interest they have in it; they have an excuse for thinking that the phantom which has been presented to them in that name is an enemy, not a friend. What chance then of a hearty popular or religious celebration of any of the events connected with its manifestation or its growth?
A plausible suggestion has been made. This very month the tercentenary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession has occurred. Might not that event unite the sympathies of all people? Is it not one for which we should give thanks to Almighty God? I think it ought certainly to unite English sympathies; for it was the commencement of the most English reign in our annals. I think we cannot praise God too much for it, seeing that it betokened an outburst of life in our country of enterprise, of thought, of song—such as we can only refer to His teaching and government. Moreover, the Queen herself was so evidently the human centre of the nation, the awakener of its energies and of its chivalry—the very pulse of the machine—that one cannot be wrong in connecting with her the blessings of her time. So far, then, it would seem as if not the third century only of her accession ought to be remembered,—as if it might give rise to an annual celebration.
But I feel convinced that this event also could not be commemorated nationally, that it would be an excuse for factious statements, and therefore for the perversion of history and the dishonour of God. Queen Elizabeth will be celebrated as par excellence the Protestant Sovereign. But we mislead our people if we give her that name. They associate Protestantism with dislike for a splendid ceremonial in worship. She had a partiality for such ceremonial. They think perhaps truly and naturally—that it is specially opposed to the celibacy of the clergy. According to accounts at least credible, she was in favour of that celibacy. They think perhaps it means special severity to Romanists. She no doubt put to death Jesuits who conspired against her without scruple. But she was nowise inclined to tolerate Puritans—the most vehement opposers of Romanism. Her foreign policy perhaps will be regarded as peculiarly anti-papal. I have no doubt that it was so in effect. But before we can prove that she meant it to be so, we must explain why the relations with France were not more affected by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; why she endured one of the most wicked of the French princes as a suitor; why William of Orange complained so much of the want of help from England.
I do not dwell upon these acts or omissions as greatly detracting from her character or usefulness. I think she did more for England—more in the best sense for Protestantism—than if she had thrown herself more vehemently into the cause. She was more completely a National Sovereign, the upholder of the Nation as such against Papal or Spanish Catholicism, than she would have been if she had cared more about the mere points in dispute between the parties. She looked up to God directly as the source of her power. The Bible was the witness to her of the only foundation upon which she or the country could stand. The more these facts are brought out, the more we shall understand her and the blessings she was the instrument of conferring upon us. But they would not be brought out in a national celebration. That would become an occasion for special pleading on behalf of Protestantism merely as a set of religious opinions,—of Protestants as a sect. And so the next age; when it was essential for the good of the land, for the discovery and assertion of important truths, that the parties which she held in union should stand face to face with each other; that the relations of parliaments to kings should be thoroughly ascertained; that the Stuart dogma, which went near to confound the earthly king with the King of kings, should be exploded; that the idea of a Kingdom of God should be proclaimed, if the attempt to realize it was ever so great a failure,—this age would become unintelligible from the use of those vague general phrases which suit parties very well, but which utterly confound us like the generalizations in physics, when we try to investigate, humbly and devoutly, the order of God’s Universe, the course of His Providence.
Still more would this treatment of Queen Elizabeth’s reign hinder us from appreciating the obligations which are laid upon those who belong to the reign of Queen Victoria, from treating faithfully the records of her times. For hers, I trust, will be not less a national reign than that of the Virgin Queen was. But as that very name indicates a relation, besides that of sovereign, into which Queen Elizabeth did not enter, and which it concerns us most deeply that our Queen has entered, so I apprehend the Family and the Nation must together lead us on,—as the mere nationality could not lead on Queen Elizabeth’s age—to the discovery of a higher Catholicism,—not incompatible with them, as the Papal Catholicism which she resisted must be,—but sustaining them against the Class and Sect spirit, against Mammon worship and individual selfishness, which are their common foes. Towards such a Catholicism the most anarchical movements in our time are pointing the way. Without it the claims of the great working body in our own country cannot be satisfied; the noble, the professional man, and the trader, cannot take up their position as its allies and leaders. Without it, the idea of a general fellowship among nations will sink into the idea of a mere customs union, and even in that low form will not be realized. When this true Catholicism in Christ has been attained, each nation may begin again to celebrate the great men who have contributed to establish it, the great crises in its history; such a celebration will indeed be a Gloria Deo in excelsis. Till then, it is better that we should endeavour, each in his own sphere, especially by cultivating the honest and devout study of history, to hasten its approach.