THE NATIONAL CHURCH IN THE ALBERT HALL.
T"great meeting of Tuesday to protest against the Welsh Suspensory Bill, went occasionally farther than we should be able to go with it. Disestablishment, —to which we are heartily opposed, except where it can be shown that an Establishment really injures the religious interests of a people,—seems to us a question rather of policy than of principle ; while Disendowment, with some reservations, especially in connection with tithes, seems to us,—except in such cases as that of Ireland, where a nation has been laid under contribution for many generations for a religion which it dreaded, disliked, and looked down upon,—very much like a policy of arbitrary and cruel con- fiscation. But spirited and powerful as many of the speeches were, we cannot say that there was enough dis- position to discriminate between Disestablishment and Disendowment on the one hand, and on the other hand, between Disendowment as regards the accumulations of property due to private generosity or devotion, and Disen- dowment as regards the accumulations of tithe-property which have been collected by the help of statutory pro- visions without which a great deal might have been lost. We should have liked to see the various speakers draw- ing very marked distinctions between these very different lines of political attack on the National Church, and a very much more lenient censure passed on the policy of Disestab- lishment than on that of Disendowment in general, and much more tolerance for Disendowment as regards tithe-property than for the Disendowment which is, in effect, nothing but the jealous and envious stripping of a formidable rival. We shall not deny that a good deal may be said, with a show at least of apparent justice, in favour of Disestablishment ; but nothing puzzles us more than the glaring injustice of the cry for Disendowment, at least in the monstrous form in which the advocates for Disendowment in Wales choose to press their demands. It may fairly be alleged,—indeed, we understood Lord Selborne to imply as much in what he said of tithe-property,—that, as Parliament has passed statutes for the collection of tithes which the Church would hardly have been otherwise able to recover in any- thing like the same amount, a considerable proportion of the tithes now belong to the Church owing only to the favour of the State. And such property, if not exactly to be termed public property, is at least in a very different position from property which is due to voluntary benefac- tions, and to voluntary benefactions only. Yet, granting as much as this to the Liberationists, it would be difficult for any candid man to believe that the whole of the tithe- property held by the Church, is really held only because the Parliament of Great Britain has provided the means for enforcing the collection of tithe. As the tithes were originally voluntary offerings to the Church, it is pretty certain that, even had Parliament passed no statutes to enforce their payment, a considerable property in tithes would still have belonged to the Church, though certainly not nearly all that she now enjoys from that source. But outside this source of the Church's endow- ment, there seems to us no reasonable case at all for the arbitrary and violent revolution that goes by the name of Disendowment. At the Reformation, the plea was the great scandals in the monastic corporations. There is no such scandal now. What pretence is there for thinking that any substantial portion of the private gifts of past generations to the Church were given only because the State had, singled out that particular form of Christianity for its favour ? Suppose it were found at the end of the next century that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the National Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children, had received certain grants from Parliament, given under the impression that these excellent Societies had. saved the State a good deal in prosecutions, as well as through the diminished pre- valence of a lawless and cruel self-will, can we suppose for a moment that our posterity would ground upon that knowledge a surmise that even their private revenues were due to these signs of State favour, and found upon that surmise an argument for the disen- dowment of these Societies and the confiscation of their property to the State? It seems to us that the pretext that a vast number of the present endowments of the Church would never have been given to her if she had not been a State Church, is just as feeble and unsupported as the pretext we have imagined for the disendowment of these two great Societies towards the year 2000, if the State had, between this and then, bestowed on them certain grants in recognition of their services to the cause of legality and morality. The argument for Disestablishment seems to us feeble, but fair from the point of view of those who urge it. The argument fq a relatively very small disendow- went, especially in relation to tithe-property, seems not at all inappropriate for those Liberationists who think that the State should never have thrown its weight into the scales of a particular religious organisation. But the argument for a really sweeping measure of Disendow- ment such as the Welsh Liberationists insist on, seems to us utterly unjust and unworthy, and indeed deserving of no toleration at all. We should much have liked to see these distinctions more emphatically stated, and to have heard a great deal less of that invective against desecra- tion and sacrilege which we find it impossible to regard as sound at all. All injustice is, in a sense, sacrilege. But it is not God but man who suffers by such sacrilege.
The boldest thing said at the Albert Hall was, perhaps, the Archbishop of Canterbury's remark "We maintain that a living nation must have not only a spiritual voice, but a spiritual personality. We would rather see Non- conformity established, and live under it as non-conforming to it, than live under no Establishment at all." But we are not sure that the Archbishop fully accepted his own proposi- tion. Does he really mean that the spiritual personality of the nation is, at the present moment, Anglican, and therefore that the Nonconformists themselves are either shut out from it, and no sharers in that personality, or else that they bor- row a show of spiritual personality from a religion which they to a large extent disown ? And does he mean that if the Establishment were to pass over to the Nonconformists as he supposes, the Anglicans would then be inclined to boast of a ventriloquising spiritual personality which did. not in the least speak in the tones of their own spiritual voice, or that they would be deprived of their spiritual per- sonality altogether ? Surely Dr. Benson's is a hard saying. It may be,—we think it is,—quite true that it would be vastly better for the nation to have some residuary legatee, as it were, of spiritual privileges and duties, to whom the poor and neglected could turn with confidence, even though the residuary legatee thus appointed did not express the real belief of more than a considerable fraction of the nation, rather than that there should be no religious trustee for the poor at all. But granting this, it is yet im- possible to say that such a residuary trustee of the religious interests of those who would otherwise not be attended to, speaks in the name of the spiritual personality of the whole nation. If the nation, as a nation, has such a personality, it should express the inner convictions of Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals and Ritualists, Plymouth Brethren and Agnostics alike,—and of course that is, in our divided state, simply impossible. We may say, if we please,—and we understand the Archbishop of Canterbury to say,—that it would be better to entrust the religious care of the poor and needy to those who seem to us in many respects seriously in error, than not to entrust them to any responsible care at all. But it is impossible to regard a religious conviction which we disown as expressing our own "spiritual personality." A religiously divided nation has, as a nation, no spiritual personality to express. "Privilege," said the Archbishop, means only "facility of access to those who must be approached for their good. That is very true ; but to grant facility of access to the poor is not any adequate expression of the spiritual personality of those who grant it, unless they themselves agree with the teaching of those to whom they concede the teaching power. The Nonconformists do not express their own spiritual personality when they give Ritualists free access to the poor, but at most only acquiesce (so far as they acquiesce) in allowing men whose views they personally disapprove to have access to the poor, rather than that the poor should be altogether neglected. And if the Estab- lishment changed hands to-morrow, it would not be the Anglicans whose spiritual personality would be expressed in the new teaching to which the poor would be subjected. It seems to us that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham outran their own premisses when they spoke of the National Church as really expressing the reli- gion of a nation so deeply and seriously divided in religion as ours is. In Catholic times, and before Wycliffe arose, no doubt the nation had its spiritual personality fairly represented by the single Church of the nation. But since the Reformation, we must all agree that the Church which speaks for us to the poor represents the religious Personality of only a large portion of the nation, hardly even of a majority, and certainly not of the whole. We appoint a religious trustee for those who would other- wise be neglected, and there, in our opinion, we do right. But we cannot honestly claim that this trustee utters at all adequately the mind and faith of the nation at large. The real defence for a national religious Establishment seems to us to be of a modest kind. It is a question of policy. If the moral interests of the poor are to be looked after at all, it is much better that they should be looked after by those who regard it as a high religious obligation to look after them, than by those who take only a languid moral interest in their condition. You cannot safely com- mit such interests to mere Lemliceans. You must select a trustee with a deep religious faith. And we know of no Church better for the purpose than that of the clergy Who, with many differences amongst themselves, are yet historically the successors of the oldest Christian clergy .of our people. To deprive the people at large of so human's- and uniting an institution as the National Church, simply because it no longer represents the convictions of the whole nation, would be a grievous and sinful waste of great resources which, on the whole, are so used as enor- mously to elevate and soften the character of English- men. To interfere wantonly with the working of such an organisation as that, as the Welsh Suspensory Bill proposes to do, on the mere chance that Parliament will Some day consent to a partial Disestablishment, would be a Sin of pure caprice which Mr. Gladstone in former days would have denounced with his most fiery eloquence, and which it is very difficult to believe that he assents to even now, with anything like hearty conviction. But it is the u. Ilf°rtnnate distinction of Church questions that, interest- ing the People so deeply as they do, whether on the side of construction or of destruction, there is a certain inevitable e xaggeration in the arguments used both by the assault and aagai.nst ny the defence. The assailants are so wild in their animosity "Privilege," that we wonder they do not rail Itinsttnature for not making all men equally destitute ; defee he garrison of the Church overstate the case for the by assuming that the nation haa still one un- the spiritual person ality,—which is just as wide of moral tk as it would be to say that it has one undivided character, or one undivided intellectual genius.
Previous page
