This November we begin to disuse what are called the State Services. I rejoice that the two Houses have asked the Queen to suspend the order appointing them. To explain why, I must also say why I cannot share some of the reasons given in justification of that step.
I shall not raise the question of the authority behind those Services. As a clergyman, I felt no hardship in obeying an Order of the Queen in Council. If they were National Services, meant to bind the nation together by recollections of the past or thanksgivings for the present, I know of no better source for them than the Sovereign. Ecclesiastical punctilios get in the way of ecclesiastical duties, and so of ecclesiastical power; they are for idle men, not for men with work to do. Many people used the Services out of mere loyalty, though they did not like them. Still, if any consciences were troubled on this ground, it is better that they be relieved. What look like idle scruples are in a thousand cases so mixed with deep convictions that we should indulge the scruples rather than wound the convictions.
Another motive for ceasing to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot, the Martyrdom of Charles, the Restoration and the Revolution has been stated very plainly in the most influential journals, and no doubt many readers accept it. “We know well enough,” it is said, “that the plot was discovered through Cecil’s wit; that Charles died because the army defeated the Parliament; that his son returned through General Monk’s intrigues; that William succeeded because of James’s confusion and weakness. Why ascribe any of this to a Divine origin? Such language does not belong to our age or honestly express our feeling. These Services have forced us to take up the tone of chronicles written in the infancy of criticism and philology, which gave every event a supernatural cause because the natural causes were unknown or wilfully ignored.”
Cant, language that does not match the truth of things or the real convictions of those who use it, is odious and mischievous. I do not deny that there are passages in these Services of that character. I have more than once pointed them out to the congregation at Lincoln’s Inn, thinking it a duty to God and to truth. But I never admitted, and cannot admit now, that the error lay in attributing ordinary events to God or in too devout a habit of recognizing Him in our country’s history. My complaint is the opposite: the Services too much reduce the tone of history to that of the newspaper. They have encouraged the very habits from which deeper awe of God, and a steadier belief that He works in the world’s transactions, would deliver us. The study of the past should lift us above the passions and party-spirit of the present. Knowing that we live under the same Divine government as our forefathers should let us call them back to life and feel that their deeds, far from being merely written in books, have helped make our actual England. I utterly deny that it is sound historical criticism or profound philology to trace events that come from a long past and will bear fruit in a long future to petty accidents or some cunning man’s contrivances. No historian is content with that. If he despises the mythical ages, one of his pleas is that they could not connect events or refer them to any common law. He prides himself on being a philosopher who sees the meaning of things and shows how one age grew out of another. That is a desirable faculty, unless it is spent in mere phrases, unless he summons the spirit of the age like a necromancer or puts vague generalizations in place of living men. He does this so often that many readers turn to the chronicler, who at least tried to record acts, however little he understood their causes, or to the newspaper, which gives names and gossip if it gives nothing else.
May it not be that belief in One who was, and is, and is to come, an actual Lord over nations and men, would save us from the temptations we meet in each of these three sources? Might it not let us profit by all of them? The old chronicler tended to look for Divine intervention in particular cases, some breach of law, usually in favour of his own cause or against its enemies. A man who believes that the King of kings is never absent from His dominions, and never forgets those He rules, may see His presence manifested in special crises, days of the Lord. But he will not suppose that what wakes men from their lethargy is more Divine than the Will that was moving and acting while they slept. The startling event is meant to make them acknowledge Him who was in that place though they knew it not. The appearing of the righteous Judge is not meant to give one part of the nation a triumph over another or to exalt a school or faction. It is meant to make its members feel they are one body, sharing the same blessings and punishments, and to make them ashamed and afraid of their factions.
In the same way, someone who really holds this faith could not see History as a dreary series of antecedents and consequents, as one class of writers makes it. Nor could he see it as a mere display of heroic men raised above their fellows, with a right to despise or trample on them, as another class does. If a Divine Will rules the whole course of the world, human wills must be the most wonderful part of the study. How they have fulfilled or refused their work, how they have understood or misunderstood it, must be the most earnest of inquiries, and no mere events can be considered apart from these. Assured that God’s Will is to manifest good and put down evil, the historian will be drawn to the best men rather than the worst. Convinced that he can know the worst only through the best, he will look for the good in each man, so as to hate the evil more. He will have no preference for Titanic men, though he must do them and their powers full justice. He is certain that God designs order and government for men, and that no true man exalts himself above others. The true man seeks sympathy with them, and has power over them in proportion to it.
So the historian is also kept from uttering oracles like the newspapers, or coveting their power. He cannot survey the world as they do, because he believes it is overlooked by One to whom he can safely trust it, and he only wants to understand a little of His ways in it. The present will then look as grand and awful to him as the past. The revolutions of his own day can be no more trifled with than those of earlier days; they too are God’s voices, days of the Lord. If he could keep that thought constantly in mind, every fact would seem wonderful and terrible. Finding out what it is would deserve all diligence, and bending it to serve himself or his school would be a great enormity.
I think our State Services sanctioned, if they did not commit, this transgression, and I am therefore thankful to be rid of them. I cannot tell whether some Members of Parliament liked one of them but were willing to give it up to be free of another. My own aversion is impartial: I object as much to the denunciation of Papists in the 5th of November Service as to that of Puritans in the other two. In each case I think historical truth was sacrificed to ferocious animosities, and putting those animosities into prayers and thanksgivings turned a sin against man into a direct sin against God. To call them confessions of sin is monstrous; they confessed other people’s sins, not our own. We denounced them; we were pure. What greater perversion of the meaning of God’s judgments could there be than to say the evils of the Stuarts’ reigns were owing to Papists and Puritans, and 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 the Services could not be read with deep repentance, but that was done by giving the words a sense they do not themselves carry, and by mourning that some of those words were ever spoken.
Yet it is a serious question whether even this passionate partisanship is not better than the coldness that may replace it. Many of us have perhaps asked whether it would be safe to part with even the vulgarest Guy Fawkes procession, which kept a people mindful of their past. We need not have wasted time on such thoughts, for ceremonies do not vanish quickly. They outlive their original associations, and no one would think of suppressing them until they become positively mischievous. But some think we should invent new commemorations, to serve as lessons in history, bonds among the nation’s members, and encouragements to trust in God. If they would serve any of these purposes, we cannot have too many, or establish them too quickly. How good it might be to commemorate the signing of Magna Charta, if we could set the transaction before the people and use it to explain Constitutional Government! But we must first believe in Constitutional Government, as earnestly as the good and wise man now sentenced to a French prison for it and for his love of England believes in it. We must believe in it as a gift of God and a reality, implied in the existence of parliaments and not created by them, and often disgraced by their misdoings. I hope we shall someday recover such a belief, or rather hold it with a fulness of meaning it has never had. But clearly it is not ours now. People joke that Constitutional Government has been weighed and found wanting, and think Absolutism on the whole more convenient. The Statesman may value the Constitution if he can tie it to some party cry; the Churchman finds it godly if he can tie it to some religious opinion; otherwise the first calls it obsolete and the second “merely secular.” All classes are learning such lessons. The Aristocracy, who fought for the Constitution in old times, now identify it with some of its meanest accidents or worst outgrowths, and think that when they defend these they defend it, and that when they must abandon them it must go. The Middle Classes, who owe everything to the constitutional principle, cannot see that it adds materially to the country’s trade, so why preserve it? The Working Classes have not yet found how deep an interest they have in it, and have an excuse for thinking the phantom presented to them under that name an enemy, not a friend. What chance, then, of a hearty popular or religious celebration of any event connected with its manifestation or growth?
A plausible suggestion has been made. This very month is the tercentenary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession. Might not that event unite everyone’s sympathies? Is it not one for which we should thank Almighty God? I think it ought to unite English sympathies, since it began the most English reign in our annals. I think we cannot praise God too much for it, since it marked an outburst of enterprise, thought and song in our country that we can refer only to His teaching and government. The Queen herself, moreover, was so evidently the human centre of the nation, the awakener of its energies and chivalry, the very pulse of the machine, that one cannot be wrong in connecting the blessings of her time with her. So far it would seem that not only the third century of her accession but every year might be remembered, perhaps with an annual celebration.
But I am convinced that this event too could not be commemorated nationally. It would be an excuse for factious statements, and so for the perversion of history and the dishonour of God. Queen Elizabeth would be celebrated as par excellence the Protestant Sovereign, and we mislead our people if we give her that name. They associate Protestantism with dislike of splendid ceremonial in worship; she had a partiality for such ceremonial. They think, perhaps naturally and truly, that it is opposed above all to clerical celibacy; by credible accounts she favoured 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 the Puritans, the most vehement opposers of Romanism. Her foreign policy may be regarded as peculiarly anti-papal, and I have no doubt it was so in effect. But before we can prove she meant it so, we must explain why 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, and why William of Orange complained so much of the lack of help from England.
I do not dwell on these acts or omissions as greatly detracting from her character or usefulness. I think she did more for England, and 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, upholding the Nation as such against Papal or Spanish Catholicism, than she would have been had she cared more about the mere points in dispute between the parties. She looked up to God directly as the source of her power, and the Bible witnessed to her of the only foundation on which she or the country could stand. The more these facts are brought out, the better we shall understand her and the blessings she conferred on us. But a national celebration would not bring them out. It would become an occasion for special pleading on behalf of Protestantism merely as a set of opinions, and of Protestants as a sect. The next age would be the same. For the good of the land and the discovery of important truths, it was essential then that the parties she had held in union should stand face to face. The relations of parliaments to kings had to be thoroughly settled, and the Stuart dogma, which nearly confounded the earthly king with the King of kings, had to be exploded. The idea of a Kingdom of God had to be proclaimed, however great a failure the attempt to realize it might be. That age would become unintelligible through the vague general phrases that suit parties well but utterly confound us, as generalizations in physics do, when we try humbly and devoutly to investigate the order of God’s Universe and the course of His Providence.
Still more would this treatment of Elizabeth’s reign hinder us from seeing the obligations on those who belong to Queen Victoria’s reign, and from treating the records of her times faithfully. For hers, I trust, will be as national a reign as that of the Virgin Queen. But “Virgin” names a relation, besides that of sovereign, which Elizabeth did not enter and which our Queen has entered, to our deepest concern. So I think the Family and the Nation together must lead us on, as mere nationality could not lead Elizabeth’s age, to the discovery of a higher Catholicism. It is not incompatible with them, as the Papal Catholicism she resisted must be. It sustains them against the spirit of Class and Sect, against Mammon-worship and individual selfishness, which are their common foes. The most anarchical movements of our time point the way to such a Catholicism. Without it the claims of the great working body in our country cannot be satisfied, and the noble, the professional man and the trader cannot take their places as its allies and leaders. Without it the idea of a general fellowship among nations will sink into a mere customs union, and even 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 helped establish it and the great crises of its history, and such a celebration will indeed be a Gloria Deo in excelsis. Till then it is better that each of us, in his own sphere, work to hasten its approach, especially by cultivating the honest and devout study of history.