THE .ZESTHETIC MODIFICATIONS OF DISSENT.
IT did not need the care which is evidently being spent on the New Congregational Memorial Hall, and the mild and manly speeches made there on Saturday on occasion of the presenta- tion of two portraits of leading Congregationalists to the Hall, to prove to us that in these latter days English Dissent is changing its temper very fast, and giiing up all the austerity of its ancient tone. Indeed Art is now rapidly finding its way into the Churches of the Dissenters, Music is beautifying their services, Learning is elevating their criticism, and general culture soften- ing their doctrine, so that the Dissenters' tone of chronic displeasure with the reigning creed is rapidly being exchanged for that of earnest desire to supply the deficiencies and ele- vate the expressive character of their own modes of worship. Even in Scotland the fascinations of music are now not always held up to abhorrence even in the severest of the Presbyterian Churches. And in England not only are music, architecture, and painting freely used by the Dissenting Churches in producing a religious impression on the minds of their worshippers, but even in relation to much more sharply controverted matters, like liturgies and forms of Church government, we constantly hear opinions expressed which would have horrified the Puritan ancestors of our modern Nonconformists. Once it used to be Episcopacy which excited the wrath and religious hatred of the severest Dissenters, while no one ever dreamt that to lend the aid of the State to a creed and ecclesias- tical polity really believed to be divine, could be anything but a pious and righteous policy. Now a totally opposite tone prevails. We hardly ever read the account of a Nonconformist conference or meeting where something genial and even sympathetic is not said of the Episcopal experiment of government, supposing that that experiment were tried without the alliance of the State. In Parlia- ment, the other day, Mr. Richard endeavoured to prove, by the rapid increase of dioceses and bishops in the United States, as compared with the stationary number of English dioceses and bishops, that alliance with the State is a deplorable evil because it obstructs the progress of the Episcopal Church. In bygone times a genuine Dissenter would have thought twice before proposing to dissolve an alliance which, in his belief, would really have had the effect of re- stricting the spread of episcopacy and hampering its influence. Yet we have more than once heard even Congregationalists speak of the Episcopal form of government with interest and sympathy, while protesting against the adventitious State-aid lent to it. In Scotland, of course, none of the great leaders of the Free- Church movement ever doubted for a moment of the abstract expediency of Establishments, — of the right kind, — though Scotland had smitten the Episcopalians hip and thigh on the express ground of the sinfulness of Episcopalianism itself. Yet now, even in Scotland, we hear much less of the idolatry of Epis- copalianism and much more of the evil principle of Establishments, than at any previous period. The truth seems to be that every- where Dissenters are becoming conscious that there is a deeper need for considerate forms and studied beauty in devotional life, than in the heat of the struggle with the ecclesiastical tyranny of former times they had been at all willing to admit, and that it is im- possible nowadays to rest the objection to the State Church either on the teaching or on the discipline of that Church, so much is there to be said for forms of ecclesiastical life of a much more elaborate and complex kind than any of those to which at first the Puritans confined their sanction. In other words, the aesthetic and intellectual life of the Dissenters is growing so rapidly as to disincline them completely to join issue with the Church of the nation on any point which raises merely questions of truth or of msthetic expediency. They must fight their battle on the ground of political justice, or they would hardly fight it at all.
And it can hardly be denied that this new catholicity of feeling in Dissent,—this new disposition in the Dissenting Churches to feel their way towards sympathy with many forms both of doctrine and ecclesiastical administration, with which they had no sympathy at all before,—produces a very real effect in relaxing even that antagonism to Establishments which has apparently taken the place of all other strait-lacedness among the Puritan Nonconformists. Denominations which have found out that there are all aorta of fine chords of intellectual and emotional sympathy between them and a National Church, which see the difficulties of a very narrow scheme of doctrine, and are not even prepared to regard Bishops as pure evils, will certainly not be able to regard their own religious life as the only religious life worth having ; and therefore will hardly be so eager to disestablish the National Church as they would have been if they had thought it altogether false and bad. It is clear enough that those who regard a creed as false and a system as tyrannical, must be very much more anxious to disentangle it from national institutions than those will be who think the creed one largely mixed with good, and the system one well worth trying. When every statue, or picture, or painted window in the National Churches was thought to be a sign of idolatry, and every vestige of prelacy was thought a treachery to the evangelic and apostolic principle, it was of course held to be a positive apostacy for the nation to endow a Church guilty of these offences. But so soon as Dissenters began to find good largely diffused through the National Church, and had even taken the line of trying to persuade that Church how much more influ- ential it might be, and how much more rapidly it might spread, if it did but throw off all the fetters of State-aid, it stood to reason that they could hardly feel the same passionate desire to dissolve the union between Church and State that they did when they thought that that union rendered homage to epos- tau and lies. You cannot protest against that with which you have large sympathies, as you can against that with which you
have no sympathy at all. If a man's own nervous system could be so extended as to involve his antagonist in it, and to make him feel with his antagonist at every stroke, do you think he could strike at that antagonist as he did before ? It is obvious that a catholic-minded Dissent cannot be so dissenting as a Dissent that is not catholic-minded, but purely dissentient. Increase the number of consentiences with any institution, and you diminish the working force of the dissen- tiences. Multiply the number of interests which are common to Dissenters and the Church, and you can hardly leave the number of conflicting interests between them anything but weakened. The mind of Dissent in relation to the Church is becoming something like that of an impartial observer who cannot agree with all he hears, and cannot sympathise with all he sees, but who, nevertheless, hardly hears anything with which he does not feel some kind of sympathy, and hardly sees anything which does not excite in him some gleam of gratified taste or feeling. Excepting Ritualism, there is probably hardly anything in the Church of the Nation which ordinary Dissenters now genuinely detest. Nay, what is more, there is hardly one of the great Dis- senting sects which is not beginning to be aware of its own deficiencies, and to look outside itself for the best hints as to how they may be supplied. All this new perception is what we express by the general word culture,' and we think it can hardly be doubted that culture has a much stronger influence in taking the ardour out of ecclesiastical crusades, than any supposed tendency injurious to State alliances with religion in the spirit of the age can compensate. All the tendencies of the age, even the aesthetic tendencies which, as we see, are affecting Dissent quite as power- fully as they are affecting any other part of the ecclesiastical world, urge men towards comprehension, towards freely com- municating to each other their doubts and difficulties and hopes and fears, instead of making-believe very much that each Church is separately infallible, though all the Churches are at variance with each other.
Now, this tendency towards comprehension can hardly be satisfied except in a National Church of confessedly com- prehensive character. And therefore, even if we admit that the timidity and sensitiveness of the day in dealing with religious beliefs incline a great many persons to rid politics of the com- plication of religious difficulties by the apparently simple device of disestablishing and disendowing the Church, and so secularising politics, yet it is obvious that it would not be without a real and costly sacrifice of men's higher aims that this device of political convenience could be adopted. For the notion, which is so much pressed, that abstract justice requires the State to give no more countenance to one creed than to another, will not bear a moment's examination. What would English opinion say, if it were proposed that the State should be perfectly evenhanded in dealing with Mohammedan and Mormon and Christian notions of marriage? Why is the State bound to be absolutely impartial to all faiths, on the ground that Englishmen are divided about them, though it is not bound to be absolutely impartial to all moral creeds, on the ground that Englishmen are divided about them ? The growing comprehensiveness and culture of Nonconformity will certainly not tend to make Nonconformists lay more stress on the argument from abstract justice, unless it also tends to make them feel, as the Irish Catholics felt, that the National Establishment is alien to the genius of the nation and a burden upon its national spirit. If the feeling of the nation becomes more and more kindly to the Established Church, the culture and taste of the nation will be more and more favourable to retaining and widening it, and the argument against it derived from abstract justice will wither away, just as the argument derived from abstract justice against a throne or an aristocracy dies away in the face of the conviction that the nation does not, in fact, suffer from the abstract injustice of these arrangements, but rather flourishes under them. We may be quite sure that the larger-minded the Nonconformists grow,—unless indeed the Church should grow more ritualistic, as they grow more able to apprehend the advantage of large creeds, and a rich devotional literature, and simple artistic forms,— the more will their zeal for pulling down the Establishment cool. They may see no other way to extricate the House of Commons from the theoretical difficulty of discussing creeds in which more than half of its constituents do not believe ; but even if, seeing no other way, they lend a reluctant assent to the cry for disestablishment and disendowment, they will feel less and less ardour in the cause, and more and more relentings towards a Church in which so many forma of faith and so many types of devotional taste can find not only a refuge, but a means of communicating freely and naturally with each other. Non-
conformists cannot really throw their heart into the attack on the National Church, and yet yearn towards it as a Church with which, were it but disestablished, they could feel large sympathies. The taste for solemn and time-honoured forms, the love of sacred art, the sympathy with various schools of thought, the reverence for learned divines of many creeds and many ages, can have but one effect,—to soften the outlines of sectarian zeal, and lend a fascination to the dreams of a fuller and better-organised scheme of comprehension. We see the results already in such speeches as Mr. S. Morley's, last Saturday, who, while holding fast to the principle of Disestablishment, still avows himself much more eager to proceed by the positive method of earnest, voluntary work, than by the negative method of aggres- sion. That preference is and must be the net result of growing taste and enlarging sympathy in Nonconformists. And the consequence of that preference cannot but be to paralyse the propagandist zeal of the assailants of the Church, and to awaken new fellow- feeling with those who • wish to share its blessings more largely, instead of to exult in the enjoyment of exclusive privileges.
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