THE CHURCH REFORM LEAGUE.
"THE manifesto of the " Church Reform League," pub- lished in the Times of Monday, is not an entirely satisfactory document. It needs amplification very mach. With the main object of the League—the change of Convoca- tion into a truly representative body empowered to legislate for the Church, subject to the veto of Parliament—we are, we need not say, cordially in accord. We have never understood why, since Parliament ceased to represent the Church, Churchmen have borne their paralysis so quietly, or why the Am.:limn Establishment, alone among Christian Churches, has been content to remain without a mouthpiece, or the power, when so moved, of improving her methods of fostering spiritual life. The Church Reform League is perfectly right an calling attention to that condition of affairs. and in seeking
to stir up the community to a demand for reform; but to make its demand effective it must formulate it in much more definite terms. It is addressing ordinary Englishmen upon a subject of which they know little ; and to make ordinary Englishmen exert themselves upon a subject they have not studied, they must be told in the clearest way what they are to exert themselves for. It is easy to say, and we heartily agree, that Convocation ought to be revivified; but before they will stir themselves average Englishmen, even when they are Churchmen, will want to know what a revivified Convoca- tion will be like. They will vote for or reject a plan, but, if we know them, they will neither vote for nor reject an aspiration ; and as yet in the mouth of the League the Con- vocation of the future is only an aspiration. The Leaguers will say they intend that, because they want by the agency of meetings, lectures, and pamphlets to wake up Church- men to the subject ; but their methods are, we believe, mistaken. Churchmen will not be awakened by a cry without a definite meaning. The Anti-Corn-Law League might as well have asked for an Act to make the people happy instead of an Act repealing the duties on imported corn. There is no need as yet of any minute detail, but the Church Reform League, to obtain an attentive hearing, must at least say from the first what Convocation is to be, whom it is to represent, and what, if it is revived, it is expected immediately or in the long ran to do. It is vain to tell Englishmen that the new Convocation is to be the assembly of the Church ; they are practical people, they have heard of a great many assemblies, and they will want to be fully con- vinced that they understand what kind of a body this particular one is to be. Till they are convinced, the members of the League—who, as we understand them, wish to be practical, and not, like too many Church bodies, to expend their energy in vague discussion—may rely upon it, they will make little impression upon that vast and well-cemented mass of in- difference of which the Bishop of Hereford spoke on Tuesday, and which it will be their first ditty to break up.
We cannot believe that it is quite impossible to suggest at least the bases of a reformed Convocation upon a plan large enough to excite national interest in the experiment. Some of those bases seem to arrange themselves almost with- out discussion. Convocation, for instance, must be a single body conterminous in its sphere of action with the territorial area of the English Church. There is no reason except a taste for antiquarianism for two Convocations, and if two exist and become efficient they will sooner or later divide the Church, at least as to its methods of action. We might as well have two Parliaments and suppose that there would be no difference between the laws of the North and the South. There would be two streams of tendency at once, and two sets of statutes, perhaps with grave differences between them, within twenty years. A living Convocation for " the Church of the country south of the Humber" is to us unthinkable, at least as a body which any probable House of Commons will consent to create. Then, again, this single Convocation must consist of two Houses, because only when sitting as a separate House can the Bishops rely upon the separate and corporate power which must be left in their hands. That power may be well-founded or ill-founded, beneficial or injurious—we will admit for the moment any variety of opinion—but they must have it for two reasons, one being the simple one that the Church of England is an Episcopal Church and must be decently logical; and the other that without the help of the Bishops neither the Church Reform League nor any other agitating body can hope to revive Convocation. They could not get the Bill through the House of Lords in the teeth of the Bishops if it passed the Commons twenty times over. Those two conditions of reform, to our mind, settle themselves before discussion has begun, and so in reality does the third, though it will be discussed in reams of print. The Lower House of Convocation must represent both clergy and laity, the idea of a separate lay House being as an actual project inadmissible. If the lay House possessed actual power it would at once begin quarrelling with the other Houses, and if it did not possess actual power Parliament would never vote the scheme, which would stand condemned by all who supply funds and who make up congrega- tions from the very beginning. How the influence of the laity is to be secured in the Lower House is a different matter, and one on which a variety of opinions is
certain to arise ; but that they must have influence, great influence, legalised influence, we hold to be self-evident ; if they have not there will be no revival of Convocation. It is vain to say that already the laity rule because they rule Parliament, for that means nothing beyond an admission that the rule of a laity over a Church is not morally unlaw- fuL The very basis of the demand for a new Convocation is that the power of Parliament as a body controlling the Church has been so suspended by events, that the Church needs another and more active interpreter of her wishes and her will. As the Bishops are clerics, and are the natural representatives of the clerical order, and as their House is to be independent and co-ordinate with the Lower House, the latter must contain a heavy representation of the laity ; we should say, indeed, an equal one. There will be fierce fighting over that, but if the laity are ever stirred enough to demand a real and living Convocation they will, we believe, be stirred enough to demand that their own share in the governing body shall be one of real influence, and, more- over, that they shall not be barred, as we see one Bishop proposes, from the discussion of any subject properly within the purview of Convocation. It is useless to say they have nothing to do with doctrine when it is they, in a vast majority, who are to live by it, or even, in the theory of the Church, to be condemned or acquitted by it. They must have their share of power, and the world being what it is, and the age what it is, it will in reality be a large one, and it is better under any great reform that the theory and the facts should correspond.
There is, we believe, one compromise by which, if the claims of the laity and of the clerical order should ever come into antagonism, they might possibly be reconciled; but it has never been discussed, and might, for what we know, in practice prove unworkable. We should not ourselves object to a Lower House occupied by clerics alone if they were all elected by the communicants, that is, in practice, by the laity. We believe that the representative method is so strong and acts so directly, that the clergy would upon all important points represent their constituents, while they themselves would thus be secure that they could not, as a caste, be over- ridden or set aside. There could be no moral objection to such a scheme, for all the Bishops and eight-tenths of the clergy are selected by laymen now, and the plan would only extend that practice into a region less admittedly spiritual than the care of dioceses or congregations. There would be a cry, of course, from both sides against such a plan; from the clergy because they would fear the electors, from the laity because they would distrust the professional feeling of the elected; but we are by no means certain that it would prove unworkable, and if it did not it would be an admirable com- promise. At all events, it is round this pivot, the position of the laity in the governing body, that practical discussion will turn, and this which must be roughly settled before the Church Reform League can hope to produce the kind of agitation which would bring the revivification of Convocation within the sphere of practical politics. It is difficult enough, as we pointed out a fortnight since, to awaken Churchmen from their long-continued indifference to the subject, and the work will never be done if the advocates of reform content themselves with indefinite phrases. They must, as their first task, state clearly and unmistakeably what they wish for and are trying to obtain. Their main argument, that the Church in its corporate capacity is paralysed by its want of a representative body, is irrefragably true, and is admitted to be true on all hands, but that argument by itself will not carry a reform. The reform has to be carried, if at an, by English politicians, and they will never act unless they are satisfied that they know what they are doing. Parliament has passed many Acts as to the effect of which it was hopelessly blind, but never one about which it did not think that either itself or its leaders were sufficiently well informed. Even when it reformed the Calendar, which no doubt to the majority of those who voted was a leap in the dark, it knew with perfect distinctness bow many days it was dropping to bring the "year" into harmony with demonstrable natural facts.
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