COMMUNION AND EXCOMMUNICATION.
rE Bishop of Cape Town is in dejection. Neither the prospect of the Pau-Anglican Synod, nor the reverential affection of the 200 young persons whom Brother Ignatius led in to receive his blessing the other day in Shoreditch, nor the mild consolations of the Bishop of Salisbury, nor the kindness of his friends in general, can cheer him. His dejection is caused by ".his brother's fall,"—his brother being the Bishop of Natal. He does not even like to hear himself praised for what he did in re the Bishop of Natal. He " only did his duty, which he could not escape doing." " The brother whom they had had to try, and whom they had had to condemn, was once a much loved brother, with whom they took sweet counsel, one of his own very dear personal friends, whose fall he deeply deplored." Why, by the way, will Churchmen always lavish this false-sounding sugary love on their antagonists ? Even if they feel it, it is far better taste not to express it in the same context with a stinging attack. Then, to prove how much he had loved the Bishop of Natal, Dr. Gray went on, after this unctuous and ill considered affection, to describe Dr. Colenso's heresies, not in Dr. Coleuso's own words, sometimes in words which Dr. Colenso has expressly repudiated as contrary to his meaning, and to report the Bishop of Natal's other iniquities in words which we do not doubt are almost entirely the result of blind prejudice and sacer- dotal passion. We have no occasion here to extract the Bishop of Cape Town's angry charges against Dr. Colenso,—we have men- tioned them elsewhere,—for we wish to speak of the only sentence of his Salisbury speech in which we heartily concur, his criticism on the foolish fuss which our Church and many of its prelates are making about " the infinitely Little," at a time when all the foundations of faith are being shaken, and Churchmen, if they speak together at all, should speak upon matters touching the very root of the Christian faith. Dr. Gray remarks, " He had had documents placed in his hand which served to show that there were those who claimed to be ministers of the Church of England, acting with her authority and in her name, who denied all the fundamental truths of Christianity, the Resurrection, the Ascen- sion, and Judgment to come. And what else did he find ? He found the Church of England moved, it was true, to its very foundations. He found great agitation, and for what? About the shape and colour of the ecclesiastical dress. He found a Com- mission appointed, upon which were sitting the great men in the State and the great men in the Church, and they were discussing that question, whilst the subject of all others, the infidelity which was spreading in our colonial possessions and here at home, did not seem to him to move the very foundation, the consciences, the convictions of Christian people in this land." We agree heartily at least in this,—that if Church Commissions are to sit and Bishops are to confer at all just now, they have something more important to discuss than albs, and stoles, or even symbolism in general. Dr. Gray's proposed remedy, however, is remark- able. He thinks all this shaking of the foundations of faith will be, if not stopped, at least seriously hindered, by excommunicating Dr. Colenso, and "giving the right hand of fellowship"—whatever that may mean—to the gentleman whom the Natal secessionists wish to have as Bishop in his place. And Dr. Gray added that thousands of colonists' hearts were "fainting within them, because they had not received that support from their brethren at home which they felt they were entitled to look for,"—the support in question being apparently—shall we say the personal satisfaction, or the fresh testimony to the truth of their faith ?—which would be extracted from driving Dr. Colenso out of the Church,—supposing that to be in their power,—or driving him out of their communion, if it is not.
Certainly this notion,—not peculiar to Dr. Gray,—that to drive a man who does not agree with you out of all participation in acts of common worship with you, is in some respects salutary both to you and to him, =will strengthen your faith, and chasten him into agreement with you, if there be any hope for him at all,—is one that is widely prevalent in our Anglican communion, and we cannot but think that some discussion as to the true conditions of communion would have been a rather better topic for the Anglican Synod than the funny details as to petty matters of discipline which the Archbishop of Canterbury announces. Where is there the slightest trace in the New Testament of this notion, that by declining to worship your own worship in conjunction with a mistaken man who interprets those acts of worship differently from yourself, you pre- vent-any good going out of you to a heretic, and retain it in your- self in consequence? If the falsest-minded Gentile 'in Jerusalem had wished to join in our Lord's worship, is there the slightest reason to suppose He would have objected? Whence did this notion of excommunicating grow up? We suppose, from St. Paul's direction to the Corinthians to give up associating for a time with a man of gross immorality. But that direction, though it may involve ideas of Church discipline which few Churches now apply, has absolutely no reference to excommunication for error. We have no hint anywhere that Christ or any of His apostles ever con- templated excluding any one from any religious rite, even for im- morality: Christ certainly prayed with Judas, and eat His last supper, the first " communion," with him. St. Paul's injunction to "put away-from among yourselves that wicked person," "not to eat " with him, and not " to company " with him, are evidently not theological rules, but moral precautions, intended, as he says, to prevent a little bad "leaven from leavening the whole lump." As'for excluding a man from any act of worship because he attached different meanings to some of the words spoken and things done from his own, we doubt if any apostle ever con- ceived anything so silly. St. Paul would have rectified the false doctrine if he could, but to forbid one who held it from joining him in his own worship he would probably have thought suicidal. How the divisions of the- Church are to be healed by warning erroneous thinkers off -your own place of worship, is to us, we confess, in- comprehensible.
Some of our readers who have, apparently, misinterpreted what we said about the Divinity of Christ being the natural centre of the English Church's worship, will reply that we are virtually encouraging this sort of division by not supporting absolute and universal comprehension in the National Church. A thoughtful correspondent, for the whole of whose letter we regret that we cannot find room, writes :-
Your readers in general probably agree with "S. C. 0." in regarding the Spectator as " the truest representative and, in a great measure, as the recognized organ of Liberal Churchmen." You are distinctly Erastian, in the democratic sense of that term; as you broadly main- tain that the whole Church, i.e., "the ,whole people, of which bishops, and priests, and congregations are mere units," "has through its represen- tatives as much right to decree a new dogma, or establish a new canon, or create a new priesthood, as it has to adopt a now commercial axiom, or pass a new law of partnership, or establish a new set of county magistrates." Nothing can be more decided than this avowal of the right of the people to regulate the Church doctrine and worship. Yet you make limitations (against which two of your correspondents have already protested) which seem to limit, not only this asserted right of decreeing new dogmas, &c., but the right of r*storing the older and wider bases of actual or proposed Church union. You are quite sure that the denial of the Deity of Christ must exclude from a national worship, and you are disposed to think the Ritualistic idea of a daily renewed sacrifice must do so too. You do not pronounce as to the necessity of specific beliefs respecting vicarious punishment, eternal torments, and other prominent doctrines. You do not plainly insist even upon the Trinity as essential. But your two exclusions are quite opposed to the ideas of Richard Baxter, and those other liberal Churchmen of his day, who advocated comprehension as the true prin.- ciple of a national Church. He would, you know, have taken as his basis of conformity the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the (so-called) Apostles' Creed, none of which exclude either the Uni- tarian or the Ritualist. Indeed, when it was objected that his terms would admit "Papists and Socinians," he bravely said, "So much the better." His principle was too liberal • for his times, but is that any reason why it should be impossible in ours? Of coarse there are natural limits to the possibility of a common worship. But how are you justified in assuming that the practical centre of worship for the English nation must be "as near as possible to the actual theological and spiritual centre of its existing prayers? "
We have never, in fact, assumed anything of the kind. We have never doubted that if the tendency of the popular faith went in a new direction, Parliament has full power to restore Roman Catholicism as the basis of the National Church worship, or to reduce its creed to Unitarianism, or to pure Theism, or even to Positivism, or any other form of religious or unreligious opinion which seemed capable of yielding the most common ground of moral advantage to the members of the National Church. But ,hitherto Parliament has wisely held, and we should think is likely for many a generation to hold, that a National Church, to be of any use, must not be built on the mere principle of the widest possible comprehension, and therefore the widest possible abstrac- tion from all concrete faiths, but rather on some one powerful form of Christian faith which is by no means universal, but still the sim- plest and least exclusive consistent with a real popular force and wide diffusion. Parliament might adopt,—and if it did, we should &aye no objection,—the same principle in relation to endowments which it has already adopted in English education, and may yet perhaps some day adopt in Irish religion. It might say that the National Church should be coextensive with the, nation, and that *everybody professing to worship in any way should be aided in its moral and religious exertions by the State. But that is, we take it, an entirely different idea from the present notion of a National Church. At present it selects one form of faith, and does its best to diffuse that amongst all who are too poor and ignorant to make any effort for their own religious benefit. The only question for our Church reformers seems to us to be, what concrete form of the Protestant faith is at once not too special and narrow, and not too *weak, for this great national mission?' It is clear, we believe, that Ritualism—meaning thereby the form of Episcopalianism which founds its idea of worship on something akin to Transubstantiation, —is much too special and Darr° w,—is so special and narrow, thateven if it could be conceived true, it is at present alienating far more people from the Church than it helps and instructs. Let the private 'believers in transubstantiation come to our Church, and welcome. 'We are against all excommunication. But let us not turn a Church which has a national and missionary work to do in ignorant
• districts into a source of offence instead of power, by allowing the priest to make a pompous profession of a belief which the English nation at large rejects and (almost superstitiously) abhors. It is a practical question where the centre of the greatest com- prehension consistent with an effective mission lies. But it is clear that a certain amount of utter rejection and repudiation by the mass of Christian people, unfits a creed to be flaunted before the eyes of the worshippers in a National Church.
We should judge in like manner of Unitarianism. It is broad -*enough, but it is too weak and too feeble in fact to be made the *Christian basis of the national worship. Our own view is that it is weak and feeble because it does not recognize the great centre of the Christian revelation,—the Incarnation. That is our conviction. But that is not the ground on which a politician can object to the excision of all prayers to Christ from the worship of the Church. If nine-tenths of the people believed the Incarnation to be a superstition, such a step would be right, and the remain- ...ing tenth would have to keep the old prayers for their own private *use. But is it so in fact? Is it not quite the contrary? is not the vital centre of the Christian faith of the great majority of Pro- testants a belief that the Son of God, "for us men and for our salva- tion came down from heaven, and was made man ?" If we are right an this, who would propose to widen the comprehension of the Church by excluding that part of her services in which the mass .of the people find the greatest power and life ? We never dreamt of excluding Unitarians from the communion. We only protested .against the notion that the worship should be blanched in order .to adapt it to the negative part of the creed of Unitarians; or *that clergymen should be appointed who cannot,—according to .their own interpretation of it,—with their whole hearth preach the Incarnation.
We should apply this principle against, as well as for, our own private convictions. There are many points in the Church's creed, to belief in which the present editor has never seen his way, but which are still profoundly rooted not only in the Church service, but in the faith of the mass of its worshippers. We should utterly object to revision of the Liturgy for the sake of extracting those theological assump- tions, simply because we ourselves cannot accept them. Where a wide and rapidly spreading conviction is growing up, as in rela- tion to the doctrine of plenary inspiration, that Scripture can and does err, or, in relation to everlasting punishments, that the gospel is a gospel of love and not of condemnation, that should be acknowledged. But to emasculate the Church's prayers in order to meet the scruples of all who, but for this and for that, would not object to join in them, is to sacrifice all power and life, for the sake of a worthless dogmatic extension.
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