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Words of charity and wisdom! spoken by one of the purest spirits, of our time-a man as fearless and generous as he was gentle and devout. They were written in defence of the Communion of a Unitarian minister in Westminster Abbey. What we claim, however, is less than is here involved-it is the right to worship sincerely, in the 'house' of our own 'congregation,' within the Church order to which we and our fathers were born. Is it not the parting of the ways? In the sixteenth century the Christianity of Northern Europe yielded to the pressure of new knowledge and new convictions, and thereby entered upon that religious development of which we see the results to-day in the comparative moral strength, national unity, and vigorous social life of the Protestant nations. At the present time, after the efforts and discipline of 300 years, a great fresh knowledge, new and legitimate conceptions of the rational life, are once more seeking admittance to and incorporation with the forms and institutions of our Christianity. The English Church can of course deny the claim. She can expel the dissidents within her borders by methods more modern but not less effectual than those by which France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries expelled the Huguenot leaven from her midst, or Spain drove out her handful of Protestants, or Rome crushed the Reform in Italy. Spiritual tyranny is as a rule only too successful. Every year, under the mild though tenacious form it assumes amongst ourselves, the Church and Christianity are silently losing multitudes of the educated class, who feel the pressure of the new knowledge, who begin perhaps by not knowing how to save their Christian fellowship honestly, and end by not caring to save it at all. While the devoted Ritualist clergy are preaching a neo-Catholic doctrine to one section of our population, through art and symbolism, through colour and poetry, there are but few, very few, clergy of another kind to preach to the thinking workman, or the university graduate, or the intelligent girl, in language that really fits their modern needs. Year by year, on the testimony of Churchmen themselves, the intellectual quality of the clergy declines, and with it their influence with the nation and the power of our common Christianity in the dark places of life. All things considered, is it not to be feared at the present moment that the Church is losing more than the energy of the High Churchmen is replacing? May it not be that in the passion of more tempting things she is putting away from her a call of God-that in the growth of this new criticism which is exercising so strong and disintegrating an effect upon her, there is a challenge to honesty and charity which she cannot refuse without laying upon herself future penalties not unlike those which the Tridentine period, with all that it implied, has in the course of time brought upon the Roman Church and the nations led by her? Wherever the Protestant principle-the principle of free criticism and personal judgment has been driven out, there one seems to see nations

divided into Ultramontanes and Freethinkers-two hostile polities within the State, aiming at wholly different goods, between whom the gulf is so great that the national life suffers profoundly-nay, the whole organism is imperilled. On the one side, a crippling and impoverishing neglect of the religious instinct and its claims; on the other, a crippling and impoverishing neglect of the rational life and its demands. On one side La Croix; on the other, the comic Vie de Jésus, and the acrid secularism of the Municipality of Paris. 'Oh, that we had ever gone through the discipline of Protestantism!' cried a Frenchman in my hearing, at some disastrous crisis of the Dreyfus case. What is now asked of the English Church by the Liberals within her borders is that she should not forcibly interfere with this discipline of Protestantism, which has so far brought her and England so much variety of good. Let there be no crushing out of the High Churchmen; no interference with the legitimate freedom of men who are entitled to all the aids that love and imagination, picture and ceremonial, can give them in the struggle with vice and apathy. But at the same time let there be no strangling of the free life of knowledge and thought within the Church; no laying of other burdens on the brethren than those laid by the Lord himself; no final division and mistrust between those who trust in the same God, who are called by the same beloved name, who hope together the same unconquerable hope.

MARY A. WARD.

1899

THE CHURCH CRISIS AND

DISESTABLISHMENT

THERE was no crisis in the Church of England before the 31st of July, in spite of all the scare headings in the newspapers. A crisis has been with us ever since, and this not merely because of the prohibition of incense, which in comparison with some other issues involved is a matter of small importance, but because the Archbishops, consciously or unconsciously, have forced Churchmen, by the very directness of their utterances, to look with open eyes at the great gulf which has yawned between the theoretical foundation of the Church of England and the actual facts of to-day. It is idle to speculate about the inwardness of their ruling, whether it was intended to sacrifice the Ritualistic troublers of our Israel in order to propitiate the Protestant sectaries, or to placate these latter while inflicting as little discomfort as possible on the former. What is certain is that the Archbishops appear to a large number of those who owe them allegiance to have gone out of their way to state, in a hard and even a harsh manner, the bondage in which the Church of the present is under to the Church of the past.

It is matter for deep regret that the stern logic of events has forced them to take this step, nor are they to be blamed for having done so. The blame, if any, must surely rest on the shoulders of those members of the Church of England who have done their best to run the old ship on the rocks, while they pursue their own individual predilections. The Liberation Society was languishing for lack of enthusiastic support; the cause of Disestablishment had been thrown back for many years by the failure of the Bill of April Under the Lincoln judgment there seemed some possibility of Churchmen learning, if not to agree, at any rate to agree to differ. The wise statesmanship of that judgment, however, has been rendered nugatory by two sections of the Church of England.

On the one hand, a certain enthusiastic, but not very instructed or self-controlled section of Churchmen had utilised the liberty which seemed to have been tacitly given to the Church for the purpose of making experiments in public worship and for introducing novelties,

which, however harmless in themselves, were quite certain to cause most determined opposition on the part of all who appreciate the traditions of Anglicanism. On the other hand, the extreme wing on the Protestant side, with equal indiscretion and heedlessness for the consciences of their brethren, have raised the cry of 'No Popery,' and have thrown ecclesiastical affairs into confusion. The result is that the whole country has been roused. Parliament has been appealed to; a widespread feeling of perplexity has been excited; and there is a general feeling that something must be done.

All this might have been quietly met and successfully overcome but for the shock given to many by no means extreme Churchmen by the blunt assertion of the Archbishops that nothing is lawful in the Church of England to-day save what is expressly permitted by an Act of Uniformity passed 340 years ago. That this assertion has once more raised the whole question of Disestablishment is obvious. It would be foolish to shut our eyes to the fact merely because we fear what Disestablishment would bring.

As one who neither desires nor fears, but expects Disestablishment in the not too distant future, I propose to suggest a few considerations arising both from the history of the Disestablishment campaign in the past, and from recent events in the Church. In the first place, no useful method for discussing such a complicated problem can be adopted save the historical. We are not to deal with what we think things ought to be or might be, but with what they are and have been, and to deduce from this what they promise or threaten to be.

The first salient point which strikes the student is the fact that a quite different ideal ruled in the Church of England in 1559 from what rules now. That extraordinary woman, Queen Elizabeth, alone saved the Church of England from being a mere duplicate of a Lutheran or Calvinistic institution. Neglecting the two extremes of irreconcilable adherents to the Papacy and followers of the Geneva discipline, she endeavoured to build up a Church which should comprehend the vast mass of the English people who were not deaf entirely to the teachings of the past, and yet were open to the wider hope of the future. These Elizabeth hoped in the true spirit of her age to weld into a homogeneous whole by a stern insistence on uniformity in rites and ceremonies. The ideal was a noble one, but, as subsequent events showed with perfect plainness, wholly impracticable in a free country. The attempt to carry it out brought down Church and State in one common ruin, and a single century sufficed to show that, whatever the inherent virtues of uniformity, they cannot thrive on English soil. This shows that the fatal flaw in the ecclesiastical law of the English Church as now laid down by the Archbishops is that it endeavours to impose methods to-day which were applicable alone in an age when uniformity was still thought desirable and practicable.

It is, however, from the period when uniformity prevailed that we are to seek for the nature of the Establishment of the English Church. Nothing, it is true, is so fallacious as the laying down of an abstract definition and the drawing of logical deductions from it which are then to be applied in practice. But at the same time it is quite possible to gather from the history, the formularies, and the law and practice of the Church, something of the precise nature of her Establishment. From this point of view it is singular to notice how extremes meet. Hooker's conception of the Church of England is well known. To him the English Church was but the community on its religious side. The persons who composed the one composed the other, even as in the days before the Conquest the jurisdictions of the Church and of the State were exercised in the Hundred Courts and the Witenagemots. Or, putting it the other way round, the Church comprised the whole body of the

nation.

To-day we have an appeal made to us to so restate our doctrine and give such elasticity to our discipline that every variety of faith or no faith may be comprehended in the National Church. This ideal of Mrs. Humphry Ward's is magnificent, but it is not war. If the National Church could be so enlarged as to find place for everybody, the first result would be that High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the orthodox Free Churches, would remain outside her borders. This would give us the curious result of a National Church embracing everybody except those who hold to the historical presentment of Christianity. This would be the undoing of the work of the Reformation with a vengeance.

Of course,

Is it possible to formulate any definition of what the Establishment approximately is? Many such definitions have been framed, but they all seem to come back to the general thesis that the union of Church and State involves the clothing of the Church with certain privileges and the fettering her by certain restrictions. it is quite possible to imagine that the restrictions might be removed, while the privileges remain. But it is not possible for any reasonable person to imagine that such a division is at all likely to be followed by our civil rulers. If they remove the controlling hand of the State, they will most surely accompany their gift of freedom by the withdrawal of a corresponding amount of privilege. Those who demand a measure of self-government for the Church, or who think that the State can be persuaded merely to repeal the Acts of Uniformity, and so leave the Church free to do what seems to her best, overlook the historical consideration that control and privilege go together. If self-government be granted we may be quite certain that ample guarantees will be taken that that self-government shall not be exercised to the detriment of the State. In other words, what the State gives with one hand she will take away with

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