3 MAY 1873, Page 12

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

THE CHURCH AND THE CLERGY.—IV.

[TO THE EDITOE OF THE "SPECTATOR.")

Sin.,—What is the explanation of the fact that Christianity is a democratic system, and yet the Christian Church now visibly favours aristocracy and wealth ; that Christianity is essentially the religion of progress, and yet the Christian Church now is the mainstay of Conservatism ; that Christianity sprang out of a revolt against the clerical spirit in religion, and yet the Christian Church is now absolutely given into the hands of the clergy ?

The last of these changes, great as it is, may be easily explained, and I imagine that it carries with it the other two. The clergy gained power in the Church through the operation of the same causes which create and raise to power other professions. Where any pursuit becomes important in a community, there will spring up a class of men whose lives are devoted to it, and there will always be a danger of this class of men monopolising the pursuit, and insensibly making it serve their tastes and interests. Where law is mach practised, a legal profession arises ; if war becomes fre- quent or lasting in a State, a standing army is sure to replace the militia, and both a legal profession and a standing army introduce embarrassments. In the case of a standing army, the danger is obvious, and therefore States struggle long against the necessity which forces them to admit it. But in most cases the new profes- sion springs up so gradually, the want it supplies is so obvious, and it supplies the want so satisfactorily, that no resistance is made, and society drifts into a new phase without knowing it. So helpless have men been in most periods amidst the currents of social change, so blind to the importance of all but the simplest phenomena, that it is not at all surprising to see the Church, with the Gospels open before her, giving place to the very evil which they expose as most dangerous to religion, and allowing a new all-powerful clerical class to arise, although she herself had had to struggle in her infancy against the pedantries of such a clerical profession. Since those times of course the political organisation of the Church has often been dis- cussed. The seventeenth century was full of such debates. Should the Church have an episcopal or a more republican govern- ment? Should it be one vast society, as the Catholics thought, or co-extensive with the State, as the Reformation held, or should it be a multitude of small local societies, which was the principle of Independency ? But these questions, though, properly speak- ing, political, were not generally examined according to the methods of political philosophy. The notion of divine right oppressed all parties alike in the Church, as it did one party in the State, and the question discussed was not what political form is best suited to the purposes of the Church, but only what form has the divine right, what form was prescribed by the Apostles. This way of looking at the matter is now out of date, and yet it has never been fairly considered in the other, the rational way. The principles familiar in civil politics have never been applied in ecclesiastical politics. Had this been done, it would have appeared at once that the Church almost everywhere suffers under an evil analogous to what is called in States bureaucracy.

Is it not the besetting vice of almost all ecclesiastical societies that they give too much prominence to paid officials ? In the State we have been wisely jealous of this. In the State, the highest kind of power, legislative power, has been carefully taken out of their hands, and reserved to the community itself and its unpaid representatives. But in the Church it is generally different. There the community is for the most part passive ; the paid offi- cial speaks, while all the rest are silent. Certainly most will admit that this is so among the Catholics. In the Church of England the official has less active power, but, I think, the unofficial class, the laity, are almost as passive, and in almost every dissenting body except the Quakers the same general type of government may be traced.

Now the evils of bureaucracy have become pretty generally understood in the present century ; we have had occasion to study them in several States. But we seldom reflect that most of the doctrines of political philosophy apply not to States alone, but to every kind of society. They apply, with certain modifications, to Churches. Bureaucracy in the Church will cause evils analogous to those which Tocqueville and others have described in the State ; the rule of the clerical profession will affect the Church in the same way that Bentham showed the rule of lawyers to operate in the State. But before I go into details, it is desirable that I should clear myself from the suspicion of being animated by that morbid horror of sacerdotaliam which afflicts so many writers now-a-days.

Sacerdotalism, within proper limits, seems to me a precious and an indispensable thing. Protestantism does not at all enable us to do without the priest, though it limits his power. How com- pletely, even in a free country, and where thought is as active as it is in England, is the ordinary man dependent for his most im- portant opinions on those whom he believes a little wiser than him- self! In a time like the present, when everything is questioned, this becomes quite ludicrously manifest. The cultivated English- man of the present day, whose education has left him without any exact knowledge except of Latin grammar, in the general Babel of opinions is for the moment without a priest. Does he fall back upon his own mind? Does he assert a complete freedom of judg- ment ? No! he adopts helplessly the opinions of the most ferocious and most persistent dogmatist he can find among our journalists. The absence of an adequate priesthood has left us at the mercy of such dogmatists. This is a time when gigantic Philistines, "draw- ing near morning and evening, and presenting themselves forty days," intimidate the armies of Israel. Our opinions have become the echo of lordly assertions, accompanied, for form's sake, with a show of argument, but producing their effect entirely by the alarm- ing tone in which they are uttered, and implicitly received until they chance to meet with an equally alarming contradiction. This is the anarchy of sacerdotalism, to which a well-organised ewer- dotalism is the only alternative.

Not only is a priesthood necessary in the abstract, but the priesthood of the Christian Church is even in its perversion, as Mr. Carlyle has acknowledged, a venerable thing. Terrible, to be sure, when bound together by celibacy and rigid dis- cipline, as in Catholicism ; the most terrible evil of modern -times, both in itself and in the opposite evil which it generates, -revolutionary frenzy ; yet never contemptible, always seductive, always tempting with a certain sinister beauty. When less rigidly organised and reconciled with society by marriage, it be- comes less commanding, but at the same time more beneficent, -and it retains a certain ideal character which makes it peculiarly precious to so material a civilisation as ours. Goethe has remarked that the Protestant country clergyman is the most poetical char- acter in modern society. He is the standing figure in the modern idyll, from the "Vicar of Wakefield " to the " Biglow Papers." Scarcely could any other single class of men have furnished so much good material to the novelist as the clergy have supplied to Mr. Anthony Trollope.

The Catholic priesthood, with all its grandeur, is, I fear, the enemy of civilisation. Liberals on the Continent are driven, almost in spite of themselves, into irreconcilable opposition to it, and those who are trying to assimilate English to Con- tinental Liberalism would drive our Irish policy into the same 'course. Against this you, Sir, have protested, very justly, in my opinion. Not less reason is there to protest against the same school when they try to hound on the English public against the Church of England and against clerical influence in general, by showing them the example of Continental Liberals. I am -as anxious to preserve clerical influence as I am to limit and to purify it. Our clergy are not, like the Catholic priesthood, the enemies, but the friends of civilisation. Our politics are not those of the Continent, but radically different, and it will be a bad day for England when its Liberals merge themselves in the Liberal party of Europe. Yet they have begun to do so. "Separation of Church and State," for instance, is a cry of Continental Liberalism. It is a most reasonable cry in countries which are struggling with despotism. The fatal enemy of liberty on the Continent has been the coalition of despotic and priestly in- fluence. If I lived under the yoke of such a coalition, I would _seek the readiest means to break it, I would make the separation of Church and State the first article of my political creed. But here, where no despotism exists and where the State means only public opinion, the cry has no meaning, and just as artificial is the fury journalists work themselves into against clerical influence in general. They are drawn into it by a misconception of the radical difference between English politics and those of the Continent.

The clerical profession in England is not an enemy to society, but one of its best friends. At the worst, it renders us one service 'which is of the highest kind. It is the only profession which stands avowedly on a moral basis. There are few classes of men among us who contemplate the occupation they live by as a service -of society. The tradesman does not even for a moment think of .his occupation as having any but a selfish object. He can only dignify it even in his own imagination by describing it as labour -undergone for his family. Even the lawyer hardly thinks of him- -self as a servant of justice ; no, he works only for his wife and -children. A soldier, a teacher, and a physician may, no doubt, mix higher views with these lower in contemplating their vocation. But on the whole, it is only the clergyman the very basis of whose life and activity is moral, and therefore, as Mr. Maurice used to say, while all other occupations are properly ministries, this is rightly called "the ministry." But I will try to show in another letter that though all this may justly be said in favour of the clerical order, yet it is to their exclusive ascendancy in the Church that the perversion of Christianity I have described is to be