CHURCH REFORM OR DISESTABLLSHMENT.
EVERY speech which comes from a representative man shows that the question which now agitates politicians most is that of the relation of the Church to the State. This week, for instance, Mr. Fawcett has intimated in no indistinct terms to his Hackney constituents, that the chance of Disesta- blishment has made a vast stride since Mr. Disraeli made up his mind that an ecclesiastical crisis was near, and that he would hasten it. Mr. Cavendish Bentinck, too, with, in this instance, a much more sagacious Conservative instinct than he has usually shown, has deprecated the needless stirring-up of the waters of ecclesiastical strife by his leader, in moving terms ; and Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen, in one of his thoroughly manly and English speeches, has given the most unanswerable reasons for believing that if Parliament really means to make uniformity of creed in the Establishment a reality, the Estab- lishment will go. The Titnes of Friday, eccentrically enough, declares that what was done last Session in relation to enforcing uniformity of public worship, instead of tending towards Dis- establishment, " will be found to act in a contrary direction." If so, it is passing strange that Member after Member, here a Radical, there a Whig, here a Conservative, there a Tory, has got Disesta- blishment on the brain,' as the result, and solely as the result, of last Session's legislation. The truth we take to be simply this :—What last Session decided was that uniformity in Ritual was to become a reality, without any clear understanding of what the standard of that uniformity is to be—a question rele- gated to the future. Again, last Session did not decide but threatened that uniformity in doctrine is also to become a reality ; and in this case the standard is definite enough, but so obsolete and so full of inconsistencies in itself, that any really drastic attempt to measure the faith of the clergy of modern times by it is quite certain to issue in endless confusion. Now it seems to us that a very serious movement for Disestablishment,—one with which the efforts of the Liberation Society will compare somewhat as the Army of Hesse Darmstadt compares with the Army of Prussia,—can only be avoided in one of two ways, either of them still feasible, but the easier of the two consisting in a mere gain of time. It is quite possible that the Public Worship Regula- tion Act of last Session may at once fall into abeyance, and -operate, if it operate at all, only in the manner in which the Ecclesiastical Titles' Act, carried after a very similar fashion, operated, namely, as a relief to the not unnaturally irritated temper of the English people, and as a kind of angry warning to the party at which it was aimed, to mind what they are about and mend their manners in time. And if that Act falls into abeyance, and the rash proposal of Mr. Lowe, still more rashly ac- .cepted by the Recorder of London, to extend the same machinery for the purpose of securing uniformity of doctrine, be dropped as quickly as possible, then assuredly there may be another longer or shorter interval of quiet, during which the various parties in the Church may rub on pretty much as before, and ecclesiastical litigation may remain a comparatively rare thing. But if some relaxation of that strenuous public purpose in this matter to which Sir William Harcourt gave last Session so magniloquent and pompom an utterance, does not take place, then it is quite certain we cannot stop where we are. Of course the reference of the Rubrics to Convocation, constituted as it is, will be without result. Of course Parliament itself will not embark on so perilous an enterprise as a minute revision and reform of the Rubrics. And of course nothing but bitter public discontent will be caused by rigidly enforcing the frequently Ritualistic, and never very liberal, Rubrics which we now have. When Parliament discovers that the Act 'to put down Ritualists' really results in putting down anti-Athanasianists, -and perhaps also Evangelicals, while it makes uncommonly little, if any, impression on the soberer Sacerdotalists, we shall soon have a cry that either the Church must be reformed or it must be disestablished; and we need not say that, for statesmen, especially in the present condition of things in the only Church body to which a proposal for reform could be referred, disestablishment will be much easier than reform. We need not add that if the provisions of the Public Worship Regulation Act should be extended to doctrine, all these
evil consequences will result, and in an infinitely more emphatic manner. Liberal Clergymen will be found easily enough who, when confronted, for instance, with the statement in the Twen- tieth Article, "Neither may it [the Church] so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another," will openly assert their right to do so, and declare their belief that to ignore the inconsistencies of statement in Scripture is simply to be dishonest expounders of it to the people, leading them to believe in a verbal infallibility which is superstitious as well as false. Yet once let the procedure for imposing uniformity of doctrine be made summary, and such a clergy- man will be fairly condemned, under the present Articles of Faith, by any Court of Judicature to which his case is referred. And what would be the result of his deprivation ? Simply, of
course, that a considerable Liberal secession would be organised, —to match the probable Ritualistic secession which would result when it became equally easy to punish the declaration that" the wicked" do eat "the Body of Christ in the use of the Lord's Supper."
Our correspondent of last week, Canon Trevor, will, then, un- derstand the point of view from which we assert that a Church which is incapable of stirring a foot this way or that from its old foundations, which has no means by which it could even deliberate to any purpose on the revision either of its Rubrics or of its Articles of Faith, with a view to simplify and enlarge them, is in a very dangerous position indeed in a time when people are call- ing out on all sides against shams, and asking for the enforce- ment of every law by which the Church is governed. Now, Canon Trevor virtually admits that this is practically the condition of the Established Church of England. He admits that Convo- cation either can or will propose nothing to enlarge and simplify the fundamental conditions of the Establishment, which Parliament would be in the least likely to accept, and yet he insists that the greatest of all dangers to the Establishment lies, not in letting matters alone, but in the attempt to find a Representative Body which would both better ex- press the actual creed and worship of the Church, and also be in greater sympathy with Parliament. Now if Canon Trevor believes that the legislation of last Session is likely to prove a dead letter, and that Parliament will shrink back in dismay from the attitude it has assumed, perhaps he is right. We can, at least, understand his posi- tion, though the delay gained would probably be short. But if he fears, as we do, that in the prevalent disposition of all Churches to return on their fundamental principles, there shows itself a permanent tendency of the time, which must lead sooner or later to the attempt to bring the formularies of the Established Church into some decent conformity with the real beliefs and thoughts of its members, then we think he is delivering himself of the most dangerous counsel which it is possible for a genuine friend of the Church to put forth. Canon Trevor maintains, indeed, that as regards the system of doctrine and discipline on which the Church is founded, there is no desire to substitute any other, or to make any substantial change. In one sense, perhaps not. In another, assuredly there is. Canon Trevor is not aware of the scandal which the flagrant contradictions between party views and the avowed formularies of the Church create. He does not see that there is something humiliating and prepos- terous in theologians who differ so widely from each other as Dean Stanley, for instance, and Archdeacon Denison, being both alike bound by formularies which in their obvious sense (a matter theologians consider too little now) would seem to render both their positions quite untenable. There is no pro- posal by any reasonable person to make the Church leas compre- hensive. But there is a very real wish on the part of all straight- forward men to make it as comprehensive in form as it is in fact. A simple ritual and a simple creed, either of which might be adopted by theologians of the most opposite schools, it is quite within the limits of possible ebange to introduce. What the English people want is to see less intellectual shuffling on the part of the Clergy, and a moderate but real comprehension enforced by the law. Now we submit that there is absolutely no hope of this without a revision of the Rubrics, and—in case of a Uniformity Act for doc- trine--a revision also of the Articles of Belief ; and both revisions must be suggested by men who represent not the Clergy only, but also the elements of Lay thought in these matters.
We hold, with Canon Trevor's letter of last week, that on the whole, the English people like the Establishment. But we do not at all believe that they like the intellectual tactics by which the position of so many of the Clergy of the Establishment can alone be justified. The cry for enforcing the law of Rubric and the law of Doctrine as it is, and for afterwards reforming both laws so far as they are virtually obsolete, so as to make them really prac- tical, shows that this is so. There is no liking in England for the " non-natural " meanings, whether Ritualistic or Rationalistic, by which the extreme positions within the Church are justified. There is no liking for ultra-Ritualism in any sense. But what the English people probably would like, would be a confessedly comprehensive Church, nearly, if not quite, as comprehensive as it actually is, but much more avowedly so, and rid, no doubt, of its openly Romanising element, which should go to its own place. The objection to any reform of Convocation which would give us a body capable of entertaining such questions, seems to us formidable only so far as all stir- rings of the ecclesiastical question must be formidable, but no further. It seems positively childish to say that a layman's suffrage, which is not impossible in the Established Church of Scotland, cannot be devised also for an Established Church in England. Then we are told that Parliament represents the lay- men of the Church of England. Well, so it does the laymen of the Church of Scotland, and yet Parliament accepts sug- gestions and advice from the Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Does not the Scotch Church belong to Scotland as a whole as much as the English Church to England ? And yet does a Free Churchman or a United Presbyterian in Scotland ever dream of claiming his right to interfere with the worship and the formulas of a Church to which he does not actually belong? All Canon Trevor's objections seem to us the objections of a fatalist, who has convinced himself that the English Establishment is so crazy that any touch will bring it down. That may possibly be true, though we do not think so. But if it is true, there will not be much harm done, after all, in bringing it down. And if it is false, there will be a great deal of good done in building it up. Hence we are not dismayed by the dangers which Canon Trevor sees in our path.
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