DEAN STANLEY'S PLEA FOR INTOLERANCE.
THE meetings at St. James's and Exeter Halls were, on the whole, clearly failures. The former was well filled, and the latter tolerably filled ; but the orator of the day was Sir Robert Peel, and the lawyer Sir Thomas Chambers ; and we need not say what sort of political calibre that implies. As for Lord Russell, Punch, though apparently as much inclined to be Bismarokian as the noble Earl, has hit off his position exactly by the admirable cartoon of this week, in which the celebrated picture of " Johnny " writing up "No Popery," and then running away, is almost outdone. Prince Bismarck is standing with his partisan sword raised to strike at the retreating mitred forms before him—(if Punch had been strictly fair, these bishops would not have been drawn re- treating, for they are standing their ground as yet courage- ously enough)—while the Prince's "backer," the diminutive Earl Russell, coronetted and with distinct evidences of the manifold attritions of a pockethandkerchief on his coun- tenance, is saying, " Go it, Bismarck! Pitch into 'em ! I'd ha' done it myself, only I've such an awfully bad cold 1 " Indeed the meetings at both St. James's and Exeter Hall would have been simply moral nonentities, not marking the higher grades of English opinion in the slightest degree, but for the letter of the Dean of Westminster and the speech of the Dean of Canterbury,—the latter a respectable dignitary who evidently is not particularly well acquainted with the subject he was required to talk about, witness, as one example, his extraordinary state- ment that "all marriages of Protestants in this country are regarded as invalid by the Roman Church," because not solemnised by a priest of the Roman Church, the fact being that the Roman Church recognises as valid a purely civil marriage between Protestants, or between a Protestant and a Catholic, though not between two Cathclics in any country in which the decrees of the Council of Trent on that head have been promulgated. But the letter of the Dean of Westminster is a very different affair. We have seldom read a document with more profound regret. The Dean of Westminster has always stood up boldly for the religious liberty not only of those of his own way of thinking, but of those most opposed to him. He has defended the Puseyites in the University of Oxford and out of it. He, if any man in the Church of England, has steadily represented the cause of religious liberty ; there is not another ecclesiastical politician in England with whom we should have been willing to identify the views of this journal ; indeed till this week we should have described ourselves as of the party of the Dean of Westminster. We can do so no longer. And the worst of it is that he evidently knows dis- tinctly what he is about. He declines in form to commit him- self either to the policy of publicly expressing sympathy with the legislation of the Prussian Diet, or to the wisdom of that legislation itself. "I would desire to be understood," he says, " as not expressing any opinion on the desirableness of calling a public meeting to express sympathy with the Emperor and the people of Germany in their resistance to the policy of the Ultramontane section of the Church of Rome. . . . .. Nor do I wish to imply any judgment on the details of the Prussian legislation which would require a more exact knowledge of the state of Germany than I can profess to claim." And yet while declining to approve either of the object of the meeting or of the policy of calling a meeting for that object, the Dean of Westminster proceeds to throw the whole of his moral influence on the side of the meeting, by enumerating the merits of the German Government in relation to this policy of perse- cution. We say deliberately, that this is a great blot on Dean Stanley's blameless and noble career as an ecclesiastical politi- cian; and that we regret it the more, because from his intimate relations with the English, and through the English, with the German Court, it will be inevitably ascribed to the disturbing influence which high connections can exert over a mind singu- larly bold and independent. Here is the Dean apologising for a series of legislative acts of the details of which he openly avows his ignorance—though it was his business to know them, before attempting to judge what was principle and what was detail at all—and which have had for their conse- quence the imprisonment not only of Catholic priests, but of many Lutheran ministers, solely for refusing to obey the mandate of the State in relation to purely ecclesiastical affairs which, in their conscientious belief, ought to be regulated by their Churches, and by their Churches only. And the Dean apologises for such a policy by empty ab- stract considerations such as these :—" The German policy, even in the judgment of those who differ from it most widely, must be acknowledged to have the merit of recognising the importance of the religions element in human society, and the duty by all lawful means of enlightening and purifying it in its contact with the various grades of civilisation." Why, if that be a merit, it is a merit which the German policy has in common with the policy of Rome, each, of course, inter- preting it in its own way what it means by " enlightening and purifying;" and not only with the policy of Rome, but with the policy of the worst of English reigns,—the reign, for instance, of Mary Tudor. And then Dean Stanley goes on to point out as a fresh merit of the German policy that it gives due significance and value to the laity, and especially to " that most important section of the laity represented in the high officers of State," —namely, the bureaucrats, which is quite true, and which we should like to see assigned by the Dean as a justification for not allowing the Wesleyans to choose freely their own form of government, but giving the Home Secretary (say) a i veto on the distribution of their itinerant preachers. That is really what the Prussian Government has done with both Catholic and Lutheran worship, and what Catholic and Lutheran priests are now in prison for resisting. The Dean says that in thus giving power to the Bureaucrats to interfere with the free religious organisations of the Churches, the Prussian legislation " continues the succession of the true idea that was - maintained in the Early Church by
the rights of the popular assembly in the Church, after the conversion of Constantine by the influence of the imperial power ;" but would the Dean seriously main- tain that " the Early Church " would have given these rights to an assembly of heretics with whom it differed in tote, say an assembly of Nicolaitans, whatever they may have been, or later, of Gnostics or of Manichasans I And would the Church have conceded to ' Constantine when a professed Pagan, or even later had he been a professed Arian, the rights which it conceded to Constantine the orthodox, though not very theological-minded emperor ? That is what he really contends for, when he applies the prece- dents of what was done in the case of the Early Church and of Constantine, to the Roman Catholic Church of to-day in relation to a sceptical or Protestant people and a Protestant Emperor. A far better analogy for him is that to which he afterwards appeals, of Henry VIII.'s arbitrary action at the time of the Reformation. But does any Englishman really suppose that England would bear the like arbitrary action of a Henry VIII. now in relation to any Church at all ? and if not, does the Dean mean to say that in relation to questions of toleration and arbitrary government, Prussia is more nearly in the condition of the England of the sixteenth century than in that of the England of the nineteenth ? It must take very strong distorting causes indeed to induce Dean Stanley to put forward such worthless excuses for a policy which, if it were attempted in England, he would be the first to condemn.
Then the Dean goes on to say that the German Government has had the wisdom to recognise the wide and deep schism in the Roman Church, and that "it cannot be deemed an interference with religious liberty to demand full scope for the develop- ment of those elements within the distracted body that it deems most in accordance with the highest views of knowledge, of patriotism, or of religion." Certainly ; who ever questioned it ? Did an English Protestant ever yet dream of complaining that the " Old Catholics " have been endowed and their Bishop recognised by the State V But is it candid to confound the protection and encouragement of the " Old Catholics," with the persecution and imprisonment of the old-fashioned Catholics, and of the Lutherans, for no crime of any kind except that of adhering to the ordinary doctrine of their Church as to the proper source of ecclesiastical authority ? Dean Stanley has no right first to ignore the ecclesiastical laws themselves as a mere matter of " detail," and then to suggest that the point in controversy is not the persecution of the old-fashioned Catholics, but the protection of the new-fashioned Catholics, for which every friend of liberty, every Broad Churchman in England, is just as anxious as he. The last of the melancholy excuses by which Dean Stanley justifies what, in England, he would be, we hope, as ashamed of as we, is the principle that the law ought to be supreme " over all persons and all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil." And no doubt, when a law is once passed, if it is not enforced, civil order disappears alto- gether, but the Dean knows perfectly well that many laws might be passed in England which neither he nor we would obey, and in our intention of disobeying which we should even exult. The question in relation to the German ecclesias- tical policy is not in the least one of the supremacy of the law, but of what kind of laws those are which are to be supreme. Are they or are they not gross invasions of the right of Churches to apply their own principles in their own way, except when these principles are inconsistent with civil order and morality ? We have shown again and again that the new laws are gross invasions of those rights which in Eng- land we have won and cherish ; and the Dean has not advanced one single consideration to show that they are not. It was of course perfectly open to the Prussian Government to decide on withdrawing altogether the aid of the State from the Roman Catholics, on the express ground that they do not contribute to the State's solidity, but to its subversion. It was open to the State to render the penalties against treason more severe, and to apply a better system to the detection of treason. But it was not open to the State, except at the sacrifice of every claim to be con- sidered a wise and tolerant Government, to render it highly penal for a Roman Catholic or Lutheran priest to continue in the old ways of ecclesiastical obedience, and to yield the old respect to the ancient authorities of his Church. This it is which the Prussian Legislature has done, and this it is for which, in hundreds of parishes, priests and ministers are alike suffering the penalty of a scrupulous conscience. And this it is for which Dean Stanley puts in an excuse of the vaguest and most irrelevant kind, professing not to commit himself to the detail, though detail is of the very essence of the matter, and then
laying down principles which have no more application to the business in hand than they have to the precession of the equi- noxes. It is a grief and a surprise to us to find Dean Stanley thus fighting on the side of Mr. Newdegate. We believe that Roman Catholicism cannot be fought by these weapons ; and that it is even now gaining materially in Germany through the folly and sins of its opponents. Meet the Church of Rome with history, with philosophy, with science, with reason, with justice, with benignity, and you will have nothing to fear. Meet it with the ignoble Bismarckian weapons of which the Dean of Westminster has .so lately discovered the value, and you will have it back again in all the power of a superstition which can appeal to the inborn reverence of man for a disinterested spiritual power labouring for human souls at the sacrifice of ease and liberty and all that makes life precious.
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