27 JUNE 1868, Page 18

ESSAYS ON CHURCH POLICY.* Tats volume of essays on Church

policy expresses so ably, with .so much reflection and so much practical knowledge, the general convictions which we have attempted to enforce for many years,

Mac••Essay an.s oa Church Polity. Edited by the Rev. W. L. Clay, M.A. London: mill

that it is not possible for this journal to be otherwise than pre- possessed in its favour. It is not in human nature perhaps to esti- mate with perfect impartiality the able presentation of convic- tions in which we so largely and profoundly agree. Still, speak- ing with as sincere a critical independence as we are capable of exercising, we may express our belief that the stamp of great ability, of a wide comprehensiveness, and, best of all, because at the root of all Church policy that is worth the name, of deep faith, will be found impressed on all these essays. We believe that they will do a great deal to reconcile the principles of a State Church with the popular principles which are spreading so rapidly through all European peoples, and to increase comprehensive- ness by deepening the springs of the faith from which they are derived.

The essays open with a very able and manly one by the Rev. T. W. Fowle, of Hoxton, on the relation, or rather the want of rela- tion, between the English Church and the working classes. Nothing can in our estimation be truer than Mr. Fowle's exposition of the democratic capacities of a National State Church,—of its far greater inherent adaptation to meet the wants of the working class, than Churches supported by voluntary subscription and almost necessarily much more influenced by the views of the few and rich amongst their supporters than by those of the many and poor. Mr. Fowle points out that the very political idea of the day, —that which is throwing the State into the power of the whole nation without regard to social rank and wealth,—should tend to draw the masses of the people to that Church which is supported by the nation's property, and which cannot therefore be governed by mere domi- nant wealth ; —that the idea, so popular in the working class, of securing an average of comfort, of education, and of enjoyment to all, before encouraging the accumulation of individual stores of comfort, education, and enjoyment, in the possession of the lucky and capable few, should tell powerfully in favour of such a dedica- tion of national wealth to the religious profit of all, as would tend to equalize at once the religious advantages and rights of the poorest and richest.

"The Demos consists, broadly speaking, of those who, being obliged to maintain existence by hard bodily labour, are thereby excluded from any very large participation in the luxuries, the pleasures, and the bless- ings of culture and civilization. Hence the constant and legitimate ten- dency of the Democracy is to insist that this natural inequality shall be as far as possible redressed by spending large sums of money from the national income upon objects calculated to benefit the people ; and the whole problem of practical statesmanship centres now in the difficulty of harmonizing this tendency with the general interests of the nation at large. There are, however, certain cases in which the benefit to the whole commonwealth is so manifest that the claims of the Demos are frankly conceded. Many instances might be quoted, but the typical one is, of course, national education ; while, on the other hand, such Bills as that for improving the dwellings of artizans raise the whole problem in its most embarrassing and difficult aspect. Now, let us imagine, for the moment, that the Demos becomes as interested in religion as it now is in education ; let us suppose—no very incredible supposition—that the working classes are as anxious to be provided with the means of religious worship as the middle classes are at present. Of coarse, if they remain indifferent, cudit qucestio; but then, as I have said, far more than the principle of endowments would full also. Now, religious institutions, to be made at all capable of doing their work, are very expensive things, as Dissenters, and Churchmen as well, have discovered ere this. Churches cost more than schools, clergymen than schoolmasters. Is not the con- clusion therefore inevitable that this is precisely one of those common benefits which the State will be expected to provide in order to redress as far as possible the inequalities of life ? Would it not be urged with irresistible force that the religion of the people is as necessary as their education, and that religion, conducing as ex hypothesi it does to general prosperity and good government, falls exactly within the limits of those things which in a well ordered State are provided in part by the common fund ?"

Mr. Fowle is not less able and honest in pointing out why the people at large actually show almost as much indifference to the State Church as to the various forms of Dissent, than in showing where it really has a great advantage over them. He paints justly enough the conservative gaucherie of the English clergy, which makes them seem so much more jealous of popular liberty than they really are,—the obsolete character of the Thirty-Nine Articles which forces so many unreal and even false proposi- tions into a mischievous prominence,—the see-saw between cold and formal services on the one side, and childish display of spectacle on the other,—the scandal taken by the working classes at the unequal division of the funds for remunerating the clergy, and especially at the sale of livings,—and their scorn for that Sabbath-keeping stringency in clergymen which seems so little based on zeal for the welfare of the labourers themselves, that it seldom becomes zeal for the diminu- tiun of the hours of labour on week-days. On all these points Mr. Fowle speaks with simplicity and wisdom. Still we think he is right in attributing more to the theological timidity and limitations of the Church than. to any other cause. Truly does he say that the narrow teaching as to everlasting punishments, as to the literal inspiration of the Bible, and as to the morality which is hastily gathered from Old Testament his- tories, is at the root of the distrust which the hard and often coarse, but very real and definite, teaching of a life of mechanical labour usually inspires. Admirably does Mr. Fowle define the true spirit of Christian teaching as to the future prospects of the soul in the following sentence:— "Men must be approached, not with a definite set of theological doc- trines upon such a vast and mysterious subject, but with (it is difficult to find a suitable word) an idea, in which hope predominates and fear mingles, the fear of sinfulness working out its own punishment in future ages, the hope of a work to be continued. a life to be lived out, a charac- ter to be developed, it may be a new chance to be allowed us, under such conditions as shall be prescribed by the justice of God."

And admirably does he sketch in general the wider sort of teach- ing by which alone the Church can hope to win the great class now so indifferent to Christ :—

" We must proclaim that Christ is Head and King not merely of the Church, but of the world ; that he has a direct interest in scientific as in religious progress, in civilization as in evangelization; that in a sense of which a timid religiousness never dreamt, the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ. We must insist upon the truth that work is part of the religion which man owes to the King of men. We must hallow the occupation of manual labour, just as the professions of medicine or justice are hallowed, by a thousand Chris- tian associations. We must vindicate for mechanical toil the same inti- mate connection with religious ideas that has ever bound together reli- gion and the calling of the shepherd or the farmer ; and we must see in the factory, no less than in the vineyard or the corn field, a true picture of the eternal relations between God and man. And we must look for- ward, iu however remote a future, to a state of things in which it shall not seem unnatural or absurd, to think of the Church as having dis- covered America, or of the world as having built Westminster Abbey."

'Only, before this ideal can be approached, we must have a Parlia- ment which ceases to pride itself on being exclusively secular, as well as a Church which ceases to pride itself on being exclusively .spiritual. The State must gain some of the spirit of the true Church, before the Church can gain the spirit of the true State. Mr. Abbott's eloquent and striking essay on "The Church and 'the Congregation," and Mr. Seeley's on " The Church as a Teacher of Morality," are to some extent remarkable expansions of this idea on the side on which alone these essayists pursue it,..-the best mode of introducing true popular life into the action of the Church. We wish that one of these able thinkers had written ou the other and almost equally important branch of the subject, the process by which we may hest hope to neutralize the pedantic and dangerous secularity of our political system. While the world keeps the Church so much at a distance, the Church, to its -own grievous disadvantage, will remain inclined, we fear, to keep the world at a distance. Intellectually speaking, what we want is the clearing up of the relation between science and faith, which, whenever it is really effected, will at once, we trust, break down the wall of partition between the Church and the world. Morally and spiritually, of course, the evil extends far beyond the limits of any intellectual puzzle. But it is the uncertainty with which the highest minds waver between the modes of conception most cha- racteristic of the nineteenth century, and the modes of conception (even more deeply rooted in our nature, but apparently and super- ficially irreconcileable with the former) most characteristic of the first century, which encourages all lower minds to draw sharply and habitually the false distinction between the spiritual and the secular which these thoughtful essayists are so anxious to erase.

The essay by Mr. Llewelyn Davies on "The Voluntary Prin- ciple," which he grasps in its largest sense as that which gives most scope to the principle of free choice in matters relating to worship, but distinguishing the kinds of free choice which are merely modes of self-will, from those which subserve that higher freedom which sets us free from self-will, seems to us (though a little too harsh in one controversial passage when he is replying to the attack of a sufficiently arrogant presumption) the deepest and most candid criticism on the philosophy of Voluntaryism which we have ever read. Like Mr. Abbott, Mr. Davies is by no means a prejudiced and thorough-going advocate of the present State- Church system as sufficient and final. He admits freely that the Voluntary system cherishes far more religious activity than our State-Church system, and is quite willing to learn from it, as is Mr. Abbott. For our own parts, we do not doubt that the private property in Church livings must be abolished, if ever the Church is to be either the popular body or the spiritual power that it ought to be ; and though we should heartily deprecate with Mr. Abbott the elective system which in Dissenting bodies makes the clergyman the nominee of the people and the gauge of their

actual amount of spiritual culture,—we should be disposed to give a veto to the congregation on their pastor after a sufficient trial,

since we believe that congregations are fully competent to recognize divergencies so wide as to preclude the possibility of a useful relationship, though not competent to choose the man from whom they may learn most.

The essay by the editor, Mr. Clay, "On Clerical Liberty of Thought and Speech," is exceedingly able and vigorous. It is founded entirely on what we believe to be a most just idea,—that the one blessing of a State Church, the one boon for which we should be most grateful instead of regarding it as the price paid for an endowment, is the exercise by the State of the power of regulating her ceremonial, and laying down the conditions of her theological comprehension. We so heartily agree with Mr. Clay, that we feel some surprise at the amount of favour which he seems to bestow on the scheme of universal endowment and universal establish- ment,—i.e., the endowment and establishment of all religious sects, in a country like Ireland, where the most important of all, the national religion, will not admit any control or regulation by the State. We confess that this seems to us to take away the largest. part of the advantage to accrue from State endowments.

Where the genius of the State and the genius of the most popular religion in any section of it are so widely divergent as to admit of no healthy mutual influences, mere State pay of the popular Church is apt to degrade the ecclesiastical recipients in their own eyes, and to sow distrust between them and their people, without producing any adequate advantages ; while, on the other hand, the State pay of any other than the popular Church creates a sense of injustice and inequality which tells in the end—like a mild sort of martyrdom--in favour of the popular Church, which is thus placed at a disadvantage. Mr. Clay sees this so clearly, that his note on the Irish Church question affects us with surprise as well as concern. That, generally, a State Church of wide comprehension legally enforced, when it is surrounded by a number of dissenting sects sufficiently near to it in doctrine to act constantly upon it and to be acted upon by it in return, is the machinery most likely to promote the discovery of religious truth and the growth of popular virtue, we think Mr. Clay has shown with admirable force. But this is true only of a nation which is on the whole composed of homogeneous elements of religious con- viction. The more we hear and read of State endowments where true Catholicism and Protestantism, or any religions really strongly opposed in principle, divide the field between them, the less we admire the result.

It is not easy to speak too highly of Mr. Seeley's admirable essay on the Church as a teacher of morality. What he says of her neglect to apply her high ideals to the actual moral problems of the day, of her folly in not illustrating that morality more than she does by the lives of noble modern Englishmen who have solved the very problems which press so hardly upon us, of her neglect in not enforcing the highest political morality, according to the precedents of the Old Testament, and of her deficiencies in inculcating the positive duties of modern life, as well as warning against the sins, comes home, every word of it, to any one who has listened for half his life to the all but uniformly wasted oppor- tunities of her pulpit teachings. Nor is Mr. Seeley anything but just when he attributes to the pulpit its one real success, the effectual inculcation of the duty of charity.

On the whole, we may fairly describe this volume of essays on Church policy as evincing a great mastery of intellectual and moral principles, a minute knowledge of the actual details of the English Church, a fearless spirit of reform, a very considerable illustrative skill, and a very deep, though exceedingly liberal, faith.