TOPICS OF THE DAY.
CHURCH-RATES AND CHURCH QUESTIONS.
WE should prefer, if there is to be a church agitation, that it did not turn upon mere questions affecting property. Whatever new adjustments may spring out of such an agitation are scarcely likely to advance much those great spiritual interests which ought to be nearest to the hearts alike of Churchmen and Dissenters. We doubt whether the Church, using that phrase in the widest conceivable sense as containing the whole body of those pro- fessing the faith Of Christ, has any energies to spare from that great struggle with the dense masses of practical heathendom, which are to be found even in this England of ours. Now cer- tainly there is no course better calculated to plunge those who are in darkness already, deeper and more unfathomably into darkness, than a squabble between Churchmen and Dissenters about the title to the property enjoyed by the Church. If consequences so serious are likely to spring from a contest of this kind, if it would really create innumerable stumbling-blocks in the way of evangelizing the community, it seems to us that those who make themselves responsible for commencing such a dispute, should be prepared with a strong case for their justifi- cation. To open questions of this magnitude without reason, without practical grievance without strong grounds of con- scientious conviction and historical right, would be a public mis- chief, were it not thoroughly frivolous, and likely to end in no- fling. except the moral condemnation of the authors of such an agitation. But in these cases it is clearly those who head the at- tack who are the parties chiefly to blame.
If we could believe that the vague criticisms upon the national character of church property, which have appeared in our columns of late, were the forerunners of a deliberately organized agitation on the part of the Dissenters for a distribution of that property among all the religious bodies in the state, we should feel com- pelled to use stronger and more condemnatory language. But wholly without development or issue as we think such criticism is likely to be, it is not the less our duty, in the interests of truth, and of the welfare of the whole community, Churchmen and Dis- senters alike, to protest against assumptions so devoid of legal and historical foundation. It is not a little difficult to understand how any person can really believe that Church endowments were originally made, "without any exception upon the distinct un- derstanding that they were to be for the benefit of the whole public while they lasted, and subject at any time to the revision of Parliament." To suppose that sheer phantasy of this kind can be the basis for any practical course in a country like England is an extraordinary miscalculation. Nothing can be more repugnant to the idea which actuated all endowers of the Church than the "whole public" notion, which is suggested as a ground for indis- criminate confiscation. Church property, is, according to the plainest deductions of history and law, in no such sense public property, as to justify Parliament in dealing with it on that ground for the benefit of the whole community. We say advisedly on that ground, because we do not now wish to raise or prejudge the question whether there is any ground of general public utility which would now justify, or may hereafter call upon Parliament, to deal in this way with Church endowments. But assuredly if it did, it would be creating a new beneficiary of this trust property, not merely providing for the old.
It would be in the highest degree unfortunate if the simple and unmistakeable grievance of church-rates were to be made by Dissenters an occasion for agitating such large questions as this of aural property. No reasonable person can doubt that the etmopulsion at present exercised in the matter must cease. Dis- senters must not be forced to pay for the fabric of the church. But if they claim this exemption as a body, it is ridiculous in the extreme to object to claim it as individuals. We have never been able to understand why the individual Dissenter should 'object to be ticketed as such for the mere practical convenience of determining who is and who is not to pay. But, on the other hand, we do not think that the church will be well advised in insisting over-strenuously upon the strict logical point that if the Dissenters do not pay they ought not to vote in vestry. Will it never be understood by. ecclesiastical or religious bodies' that in disputes concerning religions questions, the palm of victory, such victory as true-hearted men ought alone to care for, will always rest with the more generous ? Let the Church consent that any person who will hand in his name as an objector shall be ex.empt from payment. But let it leave altogether untouched the ques- tion of the right of such objectors to interfere in the management of the funds that are raised. It would very clearly result that the objectors would find themselves under a moral impossibility of exercising any legal right of interference they might possess ; a moral impossibility, which would either cause them to withdraw their objections and pay once more, or abstain so regularly from voting as to lose, by disuse, and render merely nominal their legal We are the more anxious to enforce this point of generosity in dealing with this question because we think that the Church ought to cherish so much of adhesion to itself as may be involved in the scruple, (otherwise, as we say, unintelligible ) on the part of Dissenters, to ticket themselves as objectors to the rate. If there lurk in the bottom of the Dissenter's heart the suspicion that in definitively cutting himself off from active.participation in the support and government of the Church, so far as that is now managed by vestries, he would be doing himself and the comma. nity an injury, that is not a feeling to be deepised by Church- men. It would not be well for the Church to be active in draw- ing too sharply the lino of demarcation between the Churchman and the parishioner. The great object in religious questions should be certainly not to find new points of division, but to cherish every point of union, even though at the expense of the sacrifice of some part of the logical idea of property.
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