THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S SPIRITUAL TERRORS. TIIHERE is something pathetic
and almost tragic in the craving
of those among the English Clergy who call themselves ortho- dox—whether they claim that title by virtue of their sacerdotal lineage or by virtue of their possession of some magical ,pass-word of salvation,—to restore, or see restored, the old sharp external boundary lines between—not good and evil, which cannot be too widely separated,—but good and evil men, between the Church and the world, between the divine and the human. Dr. Pusey and the Record are concocting antidotes for the comprehensive spirit of our ecclesiastical judgments, while a Committee of Convocation calls upon the Church to revive that " discipline " which would excom- municate " notorious" evil-doers or evil-thinkers, and afterwards refuse their corpses a Christian burial. In other words, the champions of the old orthodoxies are making one last effort, first to preach with new energy what Dr. Pusey calls the " revelation " of Hell, and then to realize it, so far as their power goes, upon earth, by trying to anticipate provisionally a few of the most awful sentences of the Divine Judge, and selecting " notorious " persons (other than, we conclude, peers of the realm,) whom they may condemn before their time, in order to have an excuse for denying them Christian burial. This eager craving to restore the old strongly-marked external distinctions runs directly counter to the most spiritual tendencies in modern society,—indeed, to all the best impressions which the study of revelation and the deepen- ing, though fluctuating apprehension of spiritual things which is beginning to filter through English society, tends to foster amongst us. No one can say that ours is a coarse, materialistic age. Probably at no time was there ever a wider-spread sense of the supernatural nature of the distinction between right and wrong, duty and sin. Probably at no time was there ever a deeper, though it be a vague appreciation of that supernatural purpose working in human history which was first fully made known to us in the Incarnation. In other words, there was never, perhaps, a profounder sense than there now is of the reality of the union, — and, therefore, a profounder sense of the difficulty in tracing the exact law of the union,—between the spirit of God and the life and lot of man. These (no doubt more or less dim) spiritual apprehen- sions are beginning to leaven society,—and as they do so they tend to confuse the old sharp dogmatic distinctions between the evil and the good as distinct classes of human beings, between nature and revelation, between human and divine agency. And there is, therefore, to us something pathetic in this struggle of the decaying orthodoxies to deepen the old trenches and flood the old moats, just as men are beginning to see almost universally that these trenches and moats are the chief obstacles to a spreading faith in God and His revealed truth. The one hopeful characteristic of modern feeling on theological and spiritual subjects is the disposition to recognize that moral and spiritual distinctions are far too deep to classify off this man from that man, the saints from the sinners, the Church from the world, the divine from the human. The more men study these things for themselves, the more clear they feel that, as Mr. Maurice recently remarked, it is impossible for any true man to make out for himself any case why he should be spiritually better off " than any one of the vagabonds whom we meet in the streets, whose opportunities for good are immeasurably less than our's, their temptations to evil far greater." It is not because we are becoming blind to spiritual distinctions, but because we are learning to feel the truth in them more intimately than ever, that we revolt more and more against the hard lines of division—whether sacramental, or dogmatic, or based on spiritual " experience"—by which priests attempt to forestal the deep judgments of God. We do not wish to mis- interpret the old champions of the worn-out orthodoxies on this point. We do not believe that Dr. Pusey nor Archdeacon Denison, nor even the editor of the Record, apart from his professional duties in that journal, revel personally in the imagination of the torments of Hell. We do not suppose that any of the Committee who propose to restore the practice of excommunicating "notorious" evil-livers, and then treating their corpses as if they were dogs', look forward to enjoying the exercise of this antiquated power. We believe that their only reason for arguing so passionately for the " revelation of Hell," and for vindicating the right of excommuni- cation, is that without such external tokens of the wide chasm between the good and the evil they would lose the sense of reality in these distinctions altogether. To make them geographical, is, to such minds, to render them conceivable. If they can say " Your soul must either go to Heaven or Hell," "A man must be either good or bad;' "all who go through this ceremonial may receive grace, and those who do not cannot," "A man excommunicated is put out of the reach of grace,"—then they seem to themselves to realize spiritual distinctions, for they have established spiritual lines of lati- tude and longitude within which certain processes go on, and outside which different processes go on, and that gives them a physical sense of reality. But we confess that those who attach this meaning to "reality" would do better to join either the Roman Church or the Calvinistic Dissenters, as their individual leanings might suggest to them,—for it has been the necessary result of that conflux of thought from opposite sides of the Christian Church which our Reformers encouraged,—of the confluence between the Catholic reverence for law and the Protestant sense of personal justification, —to soften, and blur, and even erase those sharp lines of distinc- tion between men by introducing a double principle of spiritual judgment ;—not only that which tests the worth of acts and motives, but that which remembers that all human acts and motives are liable to be merged in a higher influence for which we can pretend to have no adequate or even approximate human test. There may be much still to do in this direction before our Church is clear of all the unspiritual distinctions which the priestly spirit has imported into revelation. But the whole genius of our Church is opposed to the reactionary movement of the modern alarmists.
Consider a moment the resolution which the Oxford Committee, containing ' Dr. Pusey, Archdeacon Denison, and some other obscure orthodox protesters against the Privy Council Judgment, have drawn up, and which the Record entreats its own clerical adherents to sign. It runs thus:—
" We, the undersigned Presbyters and Deacons in Holy Orders of the Church of England and Ireland, hold it to be our bounden duty to the Church and to the souls of men to declare that the Church of England and Ireland, in common with the whole Catholic Church, maintains without reserve or qualification the plenary inspiration and authority of the whole canonical Scrip- tures as the Word of God, and further teaches, in the words of our Blessed Lord, that the ' punishment ' of the ' cursed' as the ' life' of the ' righteous' lasts for ever."
Such is the new symbol of Orthodoxy, sounding more like a declaratory curse than a Christian creed, which the new coalition between the Puseyite and Evangelical leaders is trying to force upon all those clergy who wish to live without blemish on their clerical reputation. Passing over the first part of it,—which un- less the word " plenary " is so vaguely defined that it conveys no clear meaning at all is simply not true,—passing over this, —note the irreverent misquotation of our Lord's words, " These shall go away into eternal punishment [Kaasn, ato:asoy] but the righteous- ness into life eternal," which not only turns an adjective into the main predicate of the sentence, but ignores the whole contro- versy as to the true translation of that adjective, and evades, with- out even a hint that it is doing so, the fact that in St. John's Gospel our Lord has Himself defined what he means both by eternal (attLyto;)1 fe and the resurrection of condemnation, and in neither case has even suggested the time-element in His definition. " This is life eternal [atdorq]—to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou halt sent." " This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil,"—strictly spiritual defini- tions, both of which ought to have the greatest influence in interpreting the words of the more popular and less theological gospels, but which Dr. Pusey and the Record, in their enthusiasm for a Hell which "lasts for ever," irreverently decline to notice. But this is not the place to discuss the teaching of our Lord as to eternal life and death, except so far as to show how those who profess the most reverence are tempted to turn His words into a brief for their own one-sided opinions. It is more to the purpose here to show that all the services of our Church which have the deepest and most permanent hold on the heart of the people entirely ignore this gospel of a Hell that " lasts for ever." " Everlasting damnation" is but once mentioned in the greater services of the Church, and then it is in a prayer of the litany to be delivered from it, which no doubt implies its possibility,—and this no one who believes in the awful free-will of man can deny,—but which also implies that it is God who delivers us from that fate and not into it. The whole spirit of our liturgy, and especially of that noble litany which seems to concentrate the worship of the Church into a climbing stair of prayer,—almost as if it were hewing living steps out of the everlasting Rock for the ascent of man as it goes on,—crying first for mercy, then for deliverance from all our clinging foes, then, as the burden lightens, reciting eagerly the pas- sion of our Lord as the pledge that the cry will be granted, and then, at last tranquillized by the recital, descending into the humble details of our human want and desire,—the whole spirit of this closely-linked chain of feeling is utterly opposed to the sharp division between classes of persons who are respectively good and evil,—saved or condemned. Nothing will stand at the last in any faith that will not bear to be "prayed," as the Bishop of St. David's recently observed. And how much would our litany be improved, by inserting after the prayer "We beseech Thee to have mercy upon all men," the amiable words of Dr. Pusey and his brother presbyters, 41 except the cursed, whose punishment lasts for ever " ? Or how would it add to the fervour of that noble prayer of thanksgiving if we added to the words "We bless Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but, above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory,"—in Dr. Pusey's language to the editor of the Record—" and for that fear of Hell which in such countless cases drives men to their forgotten Lord?" Would such additions as these add to the fascination of those wonderful services over the spirits of men? It is clear that our Church delights in holding out universal hopes, and not in brand- ishing tormenting fears,—and that it regards all men as blending -so closely that which is evil with that which is good that it seldom if ever dares to classify them into evil and good at all. It does not press the law of motives with Roman Catholic strictness, and attempt to define the distinction between venial and mortal sin. It does not attempt to cross-examine the religious consciousness like the Calvinist for the proof of election ;—it professes to record no sentence either of eternal life or eternal death, but speaks of all as if all were equal, and always liable to either fate.
And if this be the spirit of the Church as to the supposed abso- lute and final separation between the evil and the good after death, it is still more so as to any poor provisional attempt at separation in this world. Indeed, though the antiquated rubrics of our Church contemplate such an attempt, the effort now made to revive it is simply an expedient to evade the expression of hope that God's mercy can extend to "notorious" evil-livers in the next world. But for the Burial Service, and its expression of a hope that the soul of the departed may be resting in Christ, there would have been about as much chance of a wish to revive the excommunicating power in England as there would have been of our advisedly adopting what seems to us, we confess, the monstrous suggestion of our American correspondent of last week, that churches (whether private property or otherwise) are clubs, in which you have a perfect right to black- ball any one with unpleasant social peculiarities who disturbs your tranquillity of feeling in worshipping God. Indeed, the excom- municating power. though much less pseudo-aristocratic, because it professes at least to go upon purely moral grounds, would inevitably turn into some such institution of caste. Where should we find the clergyman willing to excommunicate the Marquis of Steyne of his neighbourhood, who had probably himself presented him to his living? When should we have a duke's body asking in vain for Christian burial on the ground that he had been classed amongst the goats while living, and that there was no remnant of hope for him now he was dead ? The truth is that the proposal to revive clerical excommunication is simply the most monstrous and the most unspiritnal we have heard of in these latter days, and if genuinely worked would make a Hell of Earth, and especially of the Christian Church. Indeed, who could work it with any earnest- ness? What clergyman fit for his duty would not be more likely to use the power for the first and only time upon himself (whose sins alone he can in any degree venture to fathom, and even then perhaps he is only less unfit than in the case of his fellow-men), and so abdicate for ever a responsibility never intended by God for man ?
The truth is that the services of the Church of England, though its rubrics may be conceived in a different mood, are penetrated by the spirit of our Lord's precept, " Judge not that ye be not judged." In that great Burial Service, the depth, and breadth, and height, of which give so much pain to some of our narrowly-scrupulous clergy, the whole tendency of the thought is to leave the departed soul—tenderly, perhaps,but still utterly—to the hands of God, and then to relieve the burden of anguish and doubt resting on the spirits of those who remain behind. That any man who has felt the full power of that sudden transition from the dead to the living, from the impression, suggested brithe last offices, of the shortness of life to the passionate appeal, "Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of all hearts ; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayers, but spare us Lord most holy, 0 God most mighty, 0 holy and merciful Saviour, Thou most worthy Judge Eternal, suffer us not at our last hour for any pains of death to fall from Thee,"—that any one who enters fully into such words making us feel the keenest edge of that spiritual sword which divides asunder " soul and spirit," and is " a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart," should suppose that it wishes them to occupy themselves with making up and labelling little private parcels of their acquaintances' names as "good " or "evil,'' instead of seeking to sever the evil from the good in the depths of their own heart, is almost incredible. If the Church of England follows the clue of her own highest thoughts she will cultivate a spiritual estimate of good and evil far too deep either for the coarse expedient of excommunication on earth, or the arrogant theories of a local classification of good and evil men hereafter, between two spiritual states with the miseries of one of which at least God is supposed to have committed Himself to interfere no more for ever.
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