ENGLISH CHURCH POLICY.
WE did not enter into the controversy arising out of Lord Hartington's speech with any intention of rivalling our excellent contemporary, the English historical Review. We approached the question from the point of view of practical politics,—apoint of view from which the question has considerable importance, and, we are sorry to have to add, some real danger. If Lord Hartington's speech had been delivered as an academical lecture, we are quite willing to admit it might have been open to the criticisms of Mr. Stephens and Mr. Talbot. It is quite right that "a false view of history" should be challenged in the schools and by historical experts. But we maintain, as against Mr. Talbot, that in practical ,politics false views of history have con- stantly to be accepted. Our Parliamentary liberties rest for the most part upon views of history which, if not false, are at least exceedingly disputable. It has been the way of Englishmen to found their revolutions on customary law; and as sometimes the right custom was not forthcoming, it became necessary to dress the past in clothes conceived by the present. The origin of ecclesiastical property seems to us to be a case in point. The theory gene- rally held by politicians is that ecclesiastical property is national property set apart for a particular object, but liable to revert to the State, if at any time the State should no longer think this object one to which national property can properly be devoted. We willingly concede that this theory does not represent any actual fact ; that at some time or other ecclesiastical property was certainly the property of the Church, and that no subsequent cession of it to the nation can be shown. So far, there is no real difference between us and Mr. Talbot or Mr. Stephens. We leave matters of this kind to the Bishop of Oxford or Pro- fessor Freeman. They are authorities in matters of history, and we are quite ready to accept whatever they tell us.
But it is altogether different when we quit the field of history for that of politics. Here we must decline to be bound by the opinions of any historian, however learned. The question that now has to be decided as regards the Church of England, is whether it is expedient, whether it is commonly prudent, to bring these true views of history into current controversy. To put a particular case by way of example, is it expedient, is it commonly prudent, to speak of tithe as Church pro- perty. which, in the event of Disestablishment, the State would be bound, if justice were done, to make over to the Church, just as if it were a benefaction given five years ago ? Till a little time ago, we thought that such language was wholly out of date ; that, whatever the his- torian might say, all politicians regarded Church property —other, of course, than recent endowments—as property in which the State has a reversionary interest, property, that is, which is now devoted to ecclesiastical purposes, and will continue to be so devoted so long, but only so long, as the Church shall remain established. If we understand Mr. Talbot and Mr. Stephens, we have been quite wrong in our judgment of politicians. There are some of them who are not prepared to accept this view of ecclesiastical property ; who, on the contrary, maintain that it is as much the property of the Church as Chatsworth is the property of the Duke of Devonshire ; who, in fact, intend to take the weapons of history down from the wall, and to fight the modern Liberationist with weapons borrowed from the mediinval chroniclers. This is a tendency which, as we have said, fills us with alarm. We can imagine nothing more injurious to the maintenance of the Established Church, nothing that would give the Disestablishment party greater encouragement or greater advantage.
The incidents of the recent debates on the Tithe Bill are an excellent illustration of our meaning. The one argu- ment which Sir William Harcourt found it impossible to meet, and which all his ingenuity and skill of fence was unable to evade, was that, the reversion of tithe being in the nation, opposition to the Government Bill was in effect opposition to a plan for making that reversion more secure. It went very much against the grain with the Opposition to admit this, because it necessarily gave a half-hearted air to their attacks upon the Bill. It would have been very much more convenient if they could have dismissed all thought of the future, have treated tithe as an iniquitous impost levied for the benefit of a tyrannical Church, and have resisted any and every expedient that promised to make its collection easier. We believe that if the historical view on which Mr. Talbot and Mr. Stephens lay so much stress had been the avowed doctrine of the supporters of the Tithe Bill, if the Government had said : "The position of the tithe-owner is identical with that of holders of property generally. We defend his title just as we should defend the title of any other owner ; and we should defend it just as strenuously if Disestablishment had actually taken place, and the owners of tithe were ministers of a Voluntary Church," —we feel sure that the consequences would have been disastrous. The Tithe Bill would have been forgotten, and the controversy about Disestablishment would at once have become acute. The House of Commons and the con- stituencies would have been adjured to make short work of these Old-World revived pretensions, to reassert the salutary principles embodied in the Irish Church Act, and to teach Churchmen that if the State had not given, it might at all events take away. And what would have happened in 1890 if the debates on the Tithe Bill had happened to take a ancestor would wish any money he had left for Church pur- of the first fifteen years of this century did more to poses to go to the Presbyterian majority or to the seceding stimulate English Conservatism than any partiality for Episcopalian minority ; and if the State took it away from English Conservatives, and the sympathy with Italy did both, good citizens who dislike the notion of robbery might more to stimulate English Liberalism between 1860 and console themselves with the thought that the original 1870 than any enthusiasm for Radical doctrine. donor might be just as well pleased to see his gift But, as we have said, there must be a sufficient similarity secularised as to see it left in the hands of Presbyterians. of political and social condition between the two countries to ' But this was merely an aside, and bore no relation to our be mutually affected, which we compared to the similarity main argument. That argument is simply this : Speaking in the length of the tuning-fork which is necessary to the as politicians to politicians, it is in the highest degree communication of the vibrations from one to the other. imprudent, if you wish to avert Disestablishment, to den that the property of the Church is in the last resort the different conditions which preceded the great French property of the nation, or to contend that this is true Revolution, there does not appear to have been any simply in the same sense as that in which it is true of strong reciprocal influence of each upon the other ; and individual property. We should have thought that there even for the first thirty years after the Revolution, was no need to urge this. Unfortunately, we were mistaken. the influence of France upon England was rather one of
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