Part 7 (1/2)

'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully justified his a.s.sertion.

Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe--a being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the lowest existing forms of savage life.

Then came the Darwinian theory maintaining that the whole history of the living world is a history of slow and continuous evolution, chiefly by means of incessant strife, from lower to higher forms; that man himself had in this way gradually emerged from the humblest forms of the animal world; that most of the moral deflections which were attributed to the apple in Eden are the remains and traditions of the earlier and lower stages of his existence. The theory of continuous ascent from a lower to a higher stage took the place of the theory of the Fall as the explanation of human history. It is a doctrine which is certainly not without hope for the human race. It gives no explanation of the ultimate origin of things, and it is in no degree inconsistent with the belief either in a Divine and Creative origin or in a settled and Providential plan. But it is as far as possible removed from the conception of human history and human nature which Christendom during eighteen centuries accepted as fundamental truth.

With these things have come influences of another kind. Comparative Mythology has acc.u.mulated a vast amount of evidence, showing how myths and miracles are the natural product of certain stages of human history, of certain primitive misconceptions of the course of nature; how legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the same time decomposed and a.n.a.lysed the Jewish writings, a.s.signing to them dates and degrees of authority very different from those recognised by the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records of successive developments of religious and moral progress, nor has it diminished their value as expressions of the loftiest and most enduring religious sentiments of mankind; but in the eyes of a great section of the educated world it has deprived them of the authoritative and infallible character that was once attributed to them. At the same time historical criticism has brought with it severer standards of proof, more efficient means of distinguis.h.i.+ng the historical from the fabulous.

It has traced the phases and variations of religions, and the influences that governed them, with a fulness of knowledge and an independence of judgment unknown in the past, and it has led its votaries to regard in these matters a sceptical and hesitating spirit as a virtue, and credulity and easiness of belief as a vice.

This is not a book of theology, and I have no intention of dilating on these things. It must, however, be manifest to all who are acquainted with contemporary thought how largely these influences have displaced theological beliefs among great numbers of educated men; how many things that were once widely believed have become absolutely incredible; how many that were once supposed to rest on the plane of certainty have now sunk to the lower plane of mere probability or perhaps possibility. From the time of Galileo downwards, these changes have been denounced as incompatible with the whole structure of Christian belief. No less an apologist than Bishop Berkeley declared that the belief that the date of the existence of the world was approximately that which could be deduced from the book of Genesis was one of the fundamental beliefs which could not be given up.[58] When the traveller Brydone published his travels in Sicily in 1773, conjecturing, from the deposits of lava, that the world must be much older than the Mosaic cosmogony admitted, his work was denounced as subverting the foundations of the Christian faith. The same charges were brought against the earlier geologists, and in our own day against the early supporters of the Darwinian theory; and many now living can remember the outbursts of indignation against those who first introduced the principles of German criticism into English thought, and who impugned the historical character and the a.s.sumed authors.h.i.+p of the Pentateuch.

It is not surprising or unreasonable that it should have been so, for it is impossible to deny that these changes have profoundly altered large portions of the beliefs that were once regarded as essential. One main object of a religion was believed to have been to furnish what may be called a theory of the universe--to explain its origin, its destiny, and the strange contradictions and imperfections it presents. The Jewish theory was a very clear and definite one, but it is certainly not that of modern science.

Yet few things are more remarkable than the facility with which these successive changes have gradually found their places within the Established Church, and how little that Church has been shaken by this fact. Even the Darwinian theory, though it has not yet pa.s.sed into the circle of fully established truth, is in its main lines constantly mentioned with approbation by the clergy of the Church. The theory of evolution largely pervades their teaching. The doctrine that the Bible was never intended to teach science or scientific facts, and also the main facts and conclusions of modern Biblical criticism, have been largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authors.h.i.+p or the infallibility of the Pentateuch.

And while changes of this kind have been going on in one direction, another great movement has been taking place in an opposite one. The Church of England was essentially a Protestant Church; though, being constructed more than most other Churches under political influences, by successive stages of progress, and with a view to including large and varying sections of opinion in its fold, it retained, more than other Churches, formularies and tenets derived from the Church it superseded.

The earnest Protestant and Puritan party which dominated in Scotland and in the Continental Reformation, and which refused all compromise with Rome, had not become powerful in English public opinion till some time after the framework of the Church was established. The spirit of compromise and conservatism which already characterised the English people; the great part which kings and lawyers played in the formation of the Church; their desire to maintain in England a single body, comprising men who had broken away from the Papacy but who had in other respects no great objection to Roman Catholic forms and doctrines, and also men seriously imbued with the strong Protestant feeling of Germany and Switzerland; the strange ductility of belief and conduct that induced the great majority of the English clergy to retain their preferments and avoid persecution during the successive changes of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, all a.s.sisted in forming a Church of a very composite character. Two distinct theories found their place within it. According to one school it was simply the pre-Reformation Church purified from certain abuses that had gathered around it, organically united with it through a divinely appointed episcopacy, resting on an authoritative and ecclesiastical basis, and forming one of the three great branches of the Catholic Church. According to the other school it was one of several Protestant Churches, retaining indeed such portions of the old ecclesiastical organisation as might be justified from Scripture, but not regarding them as among the essentials of Christianity; agreeing with other Protestant bodies in what was fundamental, and differing from them mainly on points which were non-essential; accepting cordially the principle that 'the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,' and at the same time separated by the gravest and most vital differences from what they deemed the great apostasy of Rome.

It was argued on the one hand that in its ecclesiastical and legal organisation the Church in England was identical with the Church in the reign of Henry VII.; that there had been no breach of continuity; that bishops, and often the same bishops, sat in the same sees before and after the Reformation; that the great majority of the parochial clergy were unchanged, holding their endowments by the same t.i.tles and tenures, subject to the same courts, and meeting in Convocation in the same manner as their predecessors; that the old Catholic services were merely translated and revised, and that although Roman usurpations which had never been completely acquiesced in had been decisively rejected, and although many superst.i.tious novelties had been removed, the Church of England was still the Church of St. Augustine; that it had never, even in the darkest period, lost its distinct existence, and that supernatural graces and sacerdotal powers denied to all schismatics had descended to it through the Episcopacy in an unbroken stream. On the other hand it was argued that the essential of a true Church lay in the accordance of its doctrines with the language of Scripture and not in the methods of Church government, and that whatever might be the case in a legal point of view, the theory of the unity of the Church before and after the Reformation was in a theological sense a delusion. The Church under Henry VII. was emphatically a theocracy or ecclesiastical monarchy, the Pope, as the supposed successor of the supposed prince of the Apostles, being the very keystone of the spiritual arch. Under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth the Church of England had become a kind of aristocracy of bishops, governed very really as well as theoretically by the Crown, totally cut off from what called itself the Chair of Peter, and placed under completely new relations with the Catholic Church of Christendom. In this s.p.a.ce of time Anglican Christianity had discarded not only the Papacy but also great part of what for centuries before the change had been deemed vitally and incontestably necessary both in its theology and in its devotions. Though much of the old organisation and many of the old formularies had been retained, its articles, its homilies, the constant teaching of its founders, breathed a spirit of unquestionable Protestantism. The Church which remained attached to Rome, and which held the same doctrines, practised the same devotions, and performed the same ceremonies as the English Church under Henry VII., professed to be infallible, and it utterly repudiated all connection with the new Church of England, and regarded it as nothing more than a Protestant schism; while the Church of England in her authorised formularies branded some of the central beliefs and devotions of the Roman Church as blasphemous, idolatrous, superst.i.tious and deceitful, and was long accustomed to regard that Church as the Church of Antichrist; the Harlot of the Apocalypse, drunk with the blood of the Saints. Each Church during long periods and to the full measure of its powers suppressed or persecuted the other.

In the eyes of the Erastian and also in the eyes of the Puritan the theory of the spiritual unity of these two bodies, and the various sacerdotal consequences that were inferred from it, seemed incredible, nor did the first generation of our reformers shrink from communion, sympathy and co-operation with the non-episcopal Protestants of the Continent. Although they laid great stress on patristic authority, and consented--chiefly through political motives--to leave in the Prayer-book many things derived from the older Church, yet the High Church theory of Anglicanism is much more the product of the seventeenth-century divines than of the reformers, just as Roman Catholicism is much more akin to the later fathers than to primitive Christianity. No one could doubt on what side were the sympathies and what were the opinions of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Jewell and Hooper, and what spirit pervades the articles and the homilies. A Church which does not claim to be infallible; which owes its special form chiefly to the sagacity of statesmen; in which the supreme tribunal, deciding what doctrines may be taught by the clergy, is a secular law court; in which the bands of conformity are so loose that the tendencies and sentiments of the nation give the complexion to the Church, appears in the eyes of men of these schools to have no possible right to claim or share the authority of the Church of Rome. It rests on another basis. It must be justified on other grounds.

These two distinct schools, however, have subsisted in the Church. Each of them can find some support in the Prayer-book, and the old orthodox High Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, always in that Church men of another kind whose true ideal lay beyond its border. Falkland, in a remarkable speech, delivered in 1640, speaks of them with much bitterness. 'Some,' he says, 'have so industriously laboured to deduce themselves from Rome that they have given great suspicion that in grat.i.tude they desire to return thither, or at least to meet it half way. Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English though not a Roman Popery; I mean not only the outside and dress of it, but equally absolute.... Nay, common fame is more than ordinarily false if none of them have found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to the preferments of England, and be so absolutely, directly and cordially Papists that it is all that 1,500_l._ a year can do to keep them from confessing it.'[59]

No wide secession to Rome, however, followed the development of this seventeenth-century school, though it played a large part in the nonjuror schism, and with the decay of that schism and under the lat.i.tudinarian tendencies of the eighteenth century it greatly dwindled.

Since, however, the Tractarian movement, which carried so many leaders of the English Church to Rome, men of Roman sympathies and Roman ideals have multiplied within the Church to an extraordinary degree. They have not only carried their theological pretensions in the direction of Rome much further than the nonjurors; they have also in many cases so transformed the old and simple Anglican service by vestments and candles, and banners and incense, and genuflexions and whispered prayers, that a stranger might well imagine that he was in a Roman Catholic church. They have put forward sacerdotal pretensions little, if at all, inferior to those of Rome. The whole tendency of their devotional literature and thought flows in the Roman channel, and even in the most insignificant matters of ceremony and dress they are accustomed to pay the greater Church the homage of constant imitation.

It would be unjust to deny that there are some real differences. The absolute authority and infallibility of the Pope are sincerely repudiated as an usurpation, the ritualist theory only conceding to him a primacy among bishops. The discipline and submission to ecclesiastical authority also, which so eminently distinguish the Roman Church, are wholly wanting in many of its Anglican imitators, and at the same time the English sense of truth has proved sufficient to save the party from the tolerance and propagation of false miracles and of grossly superst.i.tious practices so common in Roman Catholic countries. In this last respect, however, it is probable that English and American Roman Catholics are almost equally distinguished from Catholics in the Southern States of Europe and of America. Still, when all this is admitted, it can hardly be denied that there has grown up in a great section of the English Church a sympathy with Rome and an antipathy to Protestantism and to Protestant types of thought and character utterly alien to the spirit of the Reformers and to the doctrinal formularies of the Church of England.

It is not very easy to form a just estimate of the extent and depth of this movement. There are wide variations in the High Church party; the extreme men are not the most numerous and certainly very far from the ablest, and many influences other than convinced belief have tended to strengthen the party. It has been, indeed, unlike the Tractarian party which preceded it, remarkably dest.i.tute of literary or theological ability, and has added singularly little to the large and n.o.ble theological literature of the English Church. The mere charm of novelty, which is always especially powerful in the field of religion, draws many to the ritualistic channel, and thousands who care very little for ritualistic doctrines are attracted by the music, the pageantry, the pictorial beauty of the ritualistic services. aesthetic tastes have of late years greatly increased in England, and the closing of places of amus.e.m.e.nt on Sunday probably strengthens the craving for more attractive services. The extreme High Church party has chiefly fostered and chiefly benefited by this desire, but it has extended much more widely. It has touched even puritanical and non-episcopal bodies, and it is sometimes combined with extremely lat.i.tudinarian opinions. There is, indeed, a type of mind which finds in such services a happy anodyne for half-suppressed doubt. Pet.i.tions which in their poignant humiliation and profound emotion no longer correspond to the genuine feelings of the wors.h.i.+pper, seem attenuated and transformed when they are intoned, and creeds which when plainly read shock the understanding and the conscience are readily accepted as parts of a musical performance.

Scepticism as well as belief sometimes fills churches. Large cla.s.ses who have no wish to cut themselves off from religious services have lost all interest in the theological distinctions which once were deemed supremely important and all strong belief in great parts of dogmatic systems, and such men naturally prefer services which by music and ornament gratify their tastes and exercise a soothing or stimulating influence over the imagination.

The extreme High Church party has, however, other elements of attraction. Much of its power is due to the new springs of real spiritual life and the new forms of real usefulness and charity that grew out of its highly developed sacerdotal system and out of the semi-monastic confraternities which at once foster and encourage and organise an active zeal. The power of the party in acting not only on the cultivated cla.s.ses but also on the poor is very manifest, and it has done much to give the Church of England a democratic character which in past generations it did not possess, and which in the conditions of modern life is supremely important. The multiplication not only of religious services but of communicants, and the great increase in the interest taken in Church life in quarters where the Ritualist party prevail, cannot reasonably be questioned. Its highly ornate services draw many into the churches who never entered them before, and they are often combined with a familiar and at the same time impa.s.sioned style of preaching, something like that of a Franciscan friar or a Methodist preacher, which is excellently fitted to act upon the ignorant. If its clergy have been distinguished for their insubordination to their bishops, if they have displayed in no dubious manner a keen desire to aggrandise their own position and authority, it is also but just to add that they have been prominent for the zeal and self-sacrifice with which they have multiplied services, created confraternities, and penetrated into the worst and most obscure haunts of poverty and vice.

The result, however, of all this is that the conflicting tendencies which have always been present in the Church have been greatly deepened.

There are to be found within it men whose opinions can hardly be distinguished from simple Deism or Unitarianism, and men who abjure the name of Protestant and are only divided by the thinnest of part.i.tions from the Roman Church. And this diversity exists in a Church which is held together by articles and formularies of the sixteenth century.

It might, perhaps, _a priori_ have been imagined that a Church with so much diversity of opinion and of spirit was an enfeebled and disintegrated Church, but no candid man will attribute such a character to the Church of England. All the signs of corporate vitality are abundantly displayed, and it is impossible to deny that it is playing an active, powerful, and most useful part in English life. Looking at it first of all from the intellectual side, it is plain how large a proportion of the best intellect of the country is contented, not only to live within it, but to take an active part in its ministrations.

Compare the amount of higher literature which proceeds from clergymen of the Established Church with the amount which proceeds from the vastly greater body of Catholic priests scattered over the world; compare the place which the English clergy, or laymen deeply imbued with the teaching of the Church, hold in English literature with the place which Catholic priests, or sincere Catholic laymen, hold in the literature of France,--and the contrast will appear sufficiently evident. There is hardly a branch of serious English literature in which Anglican clergy are not conspicuous. There is nothing in a false and superst.i.tious creed incompatible with some forms of literature. It may easily ally itself with the genius of a poet or with great beauty of style either hortatory or narrative. But in the Church of England literary achievement is certainly not restricted to these forms. In the fields of physical science, in the fields of moral philosophy, metaphysics, social and even political philosophy, and perhaps still more in the fields of history, its clergy have won places in the foremost rank. It is notorious that a large proportion of the most serious criticism, of the best periodical writing in England, is the work of Anglican clergymen. No one, in enumerating the leading historians of the present century, would omit such names as Milman, Thirlwall and Merivale, in the generation which has just pa.s.sed away, or Creighton and Stubbs among contemporaries, and these are only eminent examples of a kind of literature to which the Church has very largely contributed. Their histories are not specially conspicuous for beauty of style, and not only conspicuous for their profound learning; they are marked to an eminent degree by judgment, criticism, impartiality, a desire for truth, a skill in separating the proved from the false or the merely probable. Compare them with the chief histories that have been written by Catholic priests. In past ages some of the greatest works of patient, lifelong industry in all literary history were due to the Catholic priesthood, and especially to members of the monastic orders; even in modern times they have produced some works of great learning, of great dialectic skill, and of great beauty of style; but with scarcely an exception these works bear upon them the stamp of an advocate and are written for the purpose of proving a point, concealing or explaining away the faults on one side, and bringing into disproportioned relief those of the other. No one would look in them for a candid estimate of the merits of an opponent or for a full statement of a hostile case. Dollinger, who would probably once have been cited as the greatest historian the Catholic priesthood had produced in the nineteenth century, died under the anathema of his Church; and how large a proportion of the best writing in modern English Catholicism has come from writers who have been brought up in Protestant universities and who have learnt their skill in the Anglican Church!

It is at least one great test of a living Church that the best intellect of the country can enter into its ministry, that it contains men who in nearly all branches of literature are looked upon by lay scholars with respect or admiration. It is said that the number of young men of ability who take orders is diminis.h.i.+ng, and that this is due, not merely to the agricultural depression which has made the Church much less desirable as a profession, and indeed in many cases almost impossible for those who have not some private fortune; not merely to the compet.i.tive examination system, which has opened out vast and attractive fields of ambition to the ablest laymen,--but also to the wide divergence of men of the best intellect from the doctrines of the Church, and the conviction that they cannot honestly subscribe its articles and recite its formularies. But although this is, I believe, true, it is also true that there is no other Church which has shown itself so capable of attracting and retaining the services of men of general learning, criticism and ability. One of the most important features of the English ecclesiastical system has been the education of those who are intended for the Church, in common with other students in the great national universities. Other systems of education may produce a clergy of greater professional learning and more intense and exclusive zeal, but no other system of education is so efficacious in maintaining a general harmony of thought and tendency between the Church and the average educated opinion of the nation.

Take another test. Compare the _Guardian_, which represents better than any other paper the opinions of moderate Churchmen, with the papers which are most read by the French priesthood and have most influence on their opinions. Certainly few English journalists have equalled in ability Louis Veuillot, and few papers have exercised so great an influence over the clergy of the Church as the _Univers_ at the time when he directed it; but no one who read those savagely scurrilous and intolerant pages, burning with an impotent hatred of all the progressive and liberal tendencies of the time, shrinking from no misrepresentation of fact and from no apology for crime if it was in the interest of the Church, could fail to perceive how utterly out of harmony it was with the best lay thought of France. English religious journalism has sometimes, though in a very mitigated degree, exhibited some of these characteristics, but no one who reads the _Guardian_, which I suppose appeals to a larger clerical public than any other paper, can fail to realise the contrast. It is not merely that it is habitually written in the style and temper of a gentleman, but that it reflects most clearly in its criticism, its impartiality, its tone of thought, the best intellectual influences of the time. Men may agree or differ about its politics or its theology, but no one who reads it can fail to admit that it is thoroughly in touch with cultivated lay opinion, and it is in fact a favourite paper of many who care only for its secular aspects.

The intellectual ability, however, included among the ministers of a Church, though one test, is by no means a decisive and infallible one of its religious life. During the period of the Renaissance, when genuine belief in the Catholic Church had sunk to nearly its lowest point, most men of literary tastes and talents were either members of the priesthood or of the monastic orders. This was not due to any fervour of belief, but simply to the fact that the Church at that time furnished almost the only sphere in which a literary life could be pursued with comfort, without molestation, and with some adequate reward. Much of the literary ability found in the English Church is unquestionably due to the attraction it offers and the facilities it gives to those who simply wish for a studious life. The abolition of many clerical sinecures, and the greatly increased activity of clerical duty imposed by contemporary opinion, have no doubt rendered the profession less desirable from this point of view; but even now there is no other profession outside the universities which lends itself so readily to a literary life, and a great proportion of the most eminent thinkers and writers in the Church of England are eminent in fields that have little or no connection with theology.

Other tests of a flouris.h.i.+ng Church are needed, but they can easily be found. Political power is one test, though it is a very coa.r.s.e and very deceptive one. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the most superst.i.tious creeds are often those which exercise the greatest political influence, for they are those in which the priesthood acquires the most absolute authority. Nor does the decline of superst.i.tion among the educated cla.s.ses always bring with it a corresponding decline in ecclesiastical influence. There have been instances, both in Pagan and Christian times, of a sceptical and highly educated ruling cla.s.s supporting and allying themselves with a superst.i.tious Church as the best means of governing or moralising the ma.s.ses. Such Churches, by their skilful organisation, by their ascendency over individual rulers, or by their political alliances, have long exercised an enormous influence, and in a democratic age the preponderance of political power is steadily pa.s.sing from the most educated cla.s.ses. At the same time, in a highly civilised and perfectly free country, in which all laws of religious disqualification and coercion have disappeared, and all questions of religion are submitted to perpetual discussion, the political power which the Church of England retains at least proves that she has a vast weight of genuine and earnest opinion behind her. No politician will deny the strength with which the united or greatly preponderating influence of the Church can support or oppose a party. It has been said by a cynical observer that the three things outside their own families that average Englishmen value the most are rank, money, and the Church of England, and certainly no good observer will form a low estimate of the strength or earnestness of the Church feeling in every section of the English people.

Still less can it be denied that the Church retains in a high degree its educational influence. For a long period national education was almost wholly in its hands, and, since all disqualifications and most privileges have been abolished, it still exercises a part in English education which excites the alarm of some and the admiration of others.

It has thrown itself heartily into the new political conditions, and the vast number of voluntary schools established under clerical influence, and the immense sums that are annually raised for clerical purposes, show beyond all doubt the amount of support and enthusiasm behind it. In every branch of higher education its clergy are conspicuous, and their influence in training the nation is not confined to the pulpit, the university, or the school. No candid observer of English life will doubt the immense effect of the parochial system in sustaining the moral level both of principle and practice, and the mult.i.tude, activity, and value of the philanthropic and moralising agencies which are wholly or largely due to the Anglican Church.