TOPICS OF THE DAY •
MR. GLADSTONE'S SPEECH.
TF the country be as sensitive to the grandeur of Mr. Gladstone's mind as we believe it to be, the speech of Thursday night will decide the question whether, in the opinion of the nation, Religion or Irreligion is to profit the most by the passing of the Affirmation Bill. The Liberals have been often supposed to favour the irreligious side of the issue, and to take that side strongly. Indeed, so far as we can judge from the significant silence of Mr. Gladstone on the result of the defeat of the Bill, the Liberal Ministry does not intend to accept a defeat from the House of Com- mons if this painful controversy should end in a majority of the House denying the civil right of every man to take his seat in that House, whatever his opinions on religious subjects may happen to be. We believe that this is as it should be. It would be impossible for a Government de- feated on this subject in the House of Commons to carry on the Administration with any credit. For this is in every sense a question of popular confidence in the Liberal instincts of the Administration ; and it is certain that no House which had once avowed its belief that it is for its sympathy with Atheism, and not for its sympathy with civil and religious liberty, that the Affirmation Bill has been introduced by the present Govern- ment, could ever give that Government effectual support through the maze of delicate issues which are still in the future. The issue should be put boldly to the House and to the country,—Do they, or do they not, think that it is from active sympathy with the Irreligious party that the Govern- ment have introduced the Affirmation Bill ? If they do think this, the Government, it is certain, can receive no support from them adequate to carry the Administration through the vast difficulties of the present and the future. If they do not think so, but hold, with Mr. Gladstone, that the whole religion of the country suffers grievously by its apparent alliance with a miser- able remnant of religious exclusiveness, then they will take pains to declare that, in the thoroughgoing Liberalism of the Government, they not only see no threat to religion, but the highest possible guarantee for the growth and influence of all true faith.
Mr. Gladstone could not have put the question on higher ground than he did on Thursday night. It is of no use to give civil and religious liberty with the reserve of halves or quarters, or rather minute decimal fractions of that liberty ; it spoils the effectiveness, the grace, the significance, in one word, the justice of the concession, and it does not reserve what could in any conceivable case be of the least use to the friends of religion. What, said Mr. Glad- stone, are the Conservatives confessedly prepared to sacrifice? They are prepared to grant at once that the Member who takes the Oath need not be a Christian,—and this without any relation to the special admission of the Jews ; they are prepared to admit that he may be an Atheist, even an avowed Atheist, so long as he has not confided his Atheism to the House before taking the oath ; they maintain, no doubt, that in that ease he has used language in a very non-natural sense, but they do not quarrel with Members who have never concealed that they did take the oath in that non-natural sense. They admit, like Sir H. Wolff, that even without straining the conscience, a bare Deist may take the oath, though he may believe that he neither knows nor can know anything at all about God, not even whether God does or does not punish us for our evil deeds, and reward us for our good deeds. All this they admit, and yet they regard this irreducible minimum of appeal to something above man, as an important guarantee of the Parliamentary standard of decency, —indeed, as one worth the enormous sacrifice in the principle of civil and religious liberty which it involves ; and this though the very man whom in this instance it happens to exclude has repeatedly demanded the right to take the oath, and though no one, so far as we know, contends that, after the dissolu- tion of this Parliament, he could be refused the right to take it, unless he were foolish enough to repeat to the next Parliament the unwary communication which has cost him so long an exclusion from this. Mr. Gladstone regards such a policy as this as in the highest degree mischievous to religion. It keeps up the tradition that religion claims the right to exclude from political influence men who declare that they have examined into the evidence of religion, and have found it wanting,—that it opens to all citizens a great civil career, on
condition that they shall not find against its claims, but forbids' them all entrance to that career if they do,—and it keeps up this injurious tradition for the most ingloriously ineffectual result, a result which irritates many, and really excludes nobody, if you except, at least, the accidental exclusion of a-single maii. for a single Parliament. The Tories might contend, perhaps, that the oath does exclude some conscientious Atheists or Agnostics, who, in spite of their Atheism and Agnosticism, have too much honour to use solemn words in an unreal sense. But then, the persons who are kept out in that case, would be the scrupulous persons,—the very persons whom, if you are not to keep out the unscrupulous, you would certainly least object to admit. The oath in that case is a bar to the tender conscience, while it is no bar to the loose conscience. Look at it which way you will, this lopped and truncated oath, so far as it is imposed on reluctant Mem- bers, becomes of no conceivable use for any purpose in the world except that of making Mr. Bradlaugh into the hero of a three years' political struggle, from which he has emerged with more followers and more readers than he could ever have hoped to obtain for himself. And luckily, even that triumph is not likely to be repeated after a dissolution of Parliament. Bob is it wise, is it anything but ignoble, to. derogate from the great principle of civil and religious liberty,. for the sake of so meagre and wretched a result as this ?
On the other hand, Mr. Gladstone showed from what ignoble views of the Oath as it is, the frank substitution of an Affirma- tion, for those who cannot assign to the more solemn elements of the oath their full significance, will relieve us. As it is, Members are compelled to admit that the oath must mean very little, that it can only represent a bare mini- mum of belief in the supernatural, that a man's Christianity is one of the superfluities no longer appealed to by the oath,. that his belief even in an Almighty Discerner and Judge of human actions, is an excrescence no longer necessarily implied in the oath ; that the oath can, strictly speaking in its Par- liamentary sense, cover no more than a bare, abstract admis- sion of an external Power above man. Now, they are com- pelled to admit this just because it is well known that- so many take the oath who do not and cannot include in it any larger significance than this, while some pro- bably would not even construe it as meaning so much. But,. said Mr. Gladstone, if you give the alternative of an affirmation to all who prefer it, for all others the oath may recover its fuller meaning. The Christian who will then elect to take the oath rather than the affirmation, will give to the oath, as he kisses the New Testament, its full Christian meaning, since he will no longer be compelled to minimize its significance for the sake of those reluctant persons on whom the House forces it, and who cannot possibly assign it that larger meaning which a deep belief in Christ's revelation lends it. That, at least, is how we understand the latter part of Mr. Glad- stone's speech, in which he explained the private signi- ficance which he himself should put upon the oath, were it not that Parliament, by forcing it on every Member, has compelled society to clip and wear away its real significance, very much as society clip and wear away the image and superscription impressed on the coinage of the country. It is the necessity of paring the oath down to the significance attached to it by the minimizers, which has neces- sarily robbed it of its fullest meaning for those who are not minimizers. It has been the wish not to exclude decent Deists, which has spoiled the impressiveness of the Oath for hearty Christians. What will impress the country in Mr. Gladstone's speech is the depth of his belief in the value of the principle of civil and religious libeitv in all its breadth and fullness, on the one hand, and his unspeakably deep conviction on the other, that the acknowledgment of that principle, instead of playing into the hands of unbelief, will tell more and more every year in favour of that faith which has suffered more from the alliance with unjust civil privilege, than from any other source whatever. It was in a world in which no such scoff could be levelled at it, that Christianity won its greatest and most signal triumphs. It will be, if we may believe Mr. Gladstone, in a world in which no such scoff can be levelled at it, that it will win its greatest triumphs again.
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