ANGLICAN CHURCH PORTRAITS.*
WE do not think we are unjust to the able as well as amiable representative of the Liberation Society who presents us with this volume of Portraits of Anglican Bishops, Deans, and Canons, if we say that they are, for the most part, clever caricatures of the " Erastian Establishment," which the Liberation Society has pledged itself to destroy. Mr. Rogers indeed tells us that his "chief aim has been to show that it is possible to be a strong opponent of a system, and yet to have a sincere admiration for many of the men who are identified with it. It is too commonly thought that those who feel themselves con- scientiously bound to seek the removal of the Establishment are influenced mainly by an envy or jealousy of its bishops or clergy, which prevents them from recognising their high personal excel- lence, or duly appreciating the great work they are doing. If this little volume does anything to remove this impression, it will not have been published in vain." But while we do not for a moment doubt the sincerity of Mr. Rogers, or his belief that his chief aim has been what he says, we should be very sorry to be able to
feel sincere admiration" for, or to "recognise high personal excellence" in, men who could be said to be fairly and adequately represented by these "Portraits." Nor should we think the better, but the worse, of the Nonconformist hostility to the Establishment, if we believed that it rested—as it is the modern fashion to assure us it does—on spiritual, and not on political and social grounds. We maintain that these so-called " spiritual " arguments against a National Church, as being in itself contrary to the simplicity of the Gospel, and a hinderance instead of a help to the spread of the faith in Christ, involve the denial of that fundamental differ- ence between worldly and national life which the Prophets and Apostles teach, and that they offer us a narrow and perpetually self-dividing sectarianism as the proper substitute for that universal communion which Paul declared himself commissioned to reveal and teach. We greatly prefer, and indeed heartily agree with, that poli- tical jealousy which protests against the exclusion of the Noncon- formists from any portion of their national right and interest in the Church. We do not intend to discuss here the great ques- tion of Disestablishment, but we will say that Mr. Rogers has our hearty sympathy when he does, in spite of himself, become political, in the following passage in his " Portrait " of the Archbishop of York
If, however, any one is prepared to assert that Churchmen and Dissenters are in a position of equality in this country, let him look at such a career as the Archbishop's. What he has achieved was, no doubt, petssible to any youth of equal ability and industry at any of our grammar-schools, but it must be on condition that he accept the Thirty-nine Articles and be a member of the Church of England. It is a glorious feature in our country, to which we may point with some degree of pride, that there are no caste distinctions which deprive dis- tinguished talent of the meed of honour and emolument to which it is fairly entitled ; but it is equally to her discredit that there are barriers, interposed in the name of religion, to the success of all who will not subscribe the Creed and conform to the Church of the State. There may have been other lads among the strong-headed people of the North, contemporaries with Dr. Thomson, and fully able to compete with him for the prizes which he won ; but if they were Presbyterians or Independents, the opportunity was denied them. So far as the Anglican Church .Portraits. By 1. G. Bogen, BA. London: James Clarke. 1876. Universities are concerned, the grievance is partly though not wholly redressed, but in the National Church it still remains. No doubt if a Church has high distinctions and ample revenues, there must be special advantages belonging to its members ; but as the Anglican Church professes to be a national institution, and is in the enjoyment of immense national funds, it has no right to maintain sectarian barriers which exclude large classes from participation in its privileges because of their religious opinions. As if is, whatever the merit of a man like Dr. Thomson, the high rewards with which it was crowned were a premium for religious and ecclesiastical orthodoxy, as well as for intellectual power and scholastic success, and they served to make the injustice which Dissenters suffer the more conspicuous."
These " Portraits " are—with some exceptions to which we will refer presently—caricatures, but they are not the less strong likenesses. Bishops, and still more Archbishops, are, as Mr.
Rogers says, chosen because among other qualifications they have, by nature or habit, more or less of the spirit of compromise in relation to the extreme opinions or practices which exist within the Church, and whatever may have been originally wanting to this or that individual Bishop in this respect is soon developed in him by the necessities of his position. He may be a weak and amiable man, as Mr. Rogers depicts the Archbishop of Canter- bury, or a strong, narrow-minded man, as he draws the Arch- bishop of York ; he may lean to rationalism, as Mr. Rogers sup- poses the Bishop of Exeter to do, or may be as full of restless and imperfectly regulated activity and disregard of conven- tionalisms as he finds to be the ease with the Bishop of Man- chester (we believe that he completely misinterprets the character of all four) ; but with these and all other differences in the indivi- duals, there is, he implies, the same main purpose of their eccle- siastical life,—to keep the opposing and conflicting elements of the Church together, by every possible device and contrivance of compromise. The episcopal mind is conservative above that of all other men : to preserve what exists by administrative care, skill, and energy, but to avoid and resist all organic reforms as revolutionary and essentially wrong,—these are no doubt char- acteristics of all our Bishops in the present day, and it is easy to depict these characteristics in any or all of them so as at once to produce a real likeness and a ridiculous caricature, as Mr. Rogers, in fact, has done. And yet the men are far from being ridiculous in themselves ; it is true that not one of them is capa- ble of originating those organic reforms which can alone save the National Church ; but till the Heaven-born genius appears—and there is as little sign of his coming among the destructive Liberationists as amongthe conservative Episcopalians—it is not a ridiculous but a respectable and creditable employment to keep that which exists in as good a condition for daily use as is possible.
The " Portraits " of Dr. Pusey and Dr. Liddon we do not call caricatures. With them Mr. Rogers has evidently more sym- pathy than with the Bishops, notwithstanding their High-Church doctrines. He feels that they are not friends, but enemies of the- Erastian Establishment, that their spirit is as sectarian as his own, and that it is by excommunication and not by comprehen- sion that they, like so many excellent Nonconformists, believe that the true Church is to be defined and maintained. He feels that even while such Churchmen uphold the Establishment ad interim, they are, like himself, stripping it "of that unreal and delusive halo with which Dean Stanley and other such dreamers seek to invest it." And Dean Stanley himself, strange as it may at first seem, is painted in some respects in less favourable colours than any other of the Anglican portraits in this volume. This at least is the impression that is left on our minds. On the one hand, there is a good deal of very strong and warm admiration for "the true-hearted Christian gentleman, the gallant champion of what he believes right, the fascinating writer, the diligent worker in the cause of freedom and progress." On the other hand, we have hints, or more than hints, that Mr. Rogers is one of those orthodox persons "who regard the influence which he [the Dean} is exerting upon the religious opinion of the country as most disastrous." And again, we have the following passage on the invitation of the Dean of Westminster to Professor Max Miille,r to give a missionary lecture in the Abbey on St. Andrew's Day :—
" The choice was, to Bay the least, eccentric ; and when it was an- nounced, the first feeling was one of surprise at the grotesqueness and general incongruity of the arrangement, and it was not changed by the perusal of the Professor's extremely able but, as the most devout friends of Christian Missions considered, very unsatisfactory and objectionable address. The object to be attained by the appointment of such a day at all was to rouse spiritual fervour, and anything leas calculated to do it—it might be said, anything more fitted to repress it—than the lecture, cannot easily be conceived. But whatever opinion be formed of his wisdom in the selection of a speaker, there remains the remarkable fact that to Dean Stanley we are indebted for the introduction of an unor- dained man as a lecturer in connection with a religious service in Westminster Abbey. The effect was various on different minds. It led some who hitherto had regarded the movement towards an interchange of pulpits between Churchmen and Nonconformists with favour, to look upon it more doubtfully, when they saw that the freedom they were willing to concede to Evangelical Nonconformists might open a door by which Professor Huxley might come to lecture on 'Protoplasm,' or Dr. Tyndall to discourse on the philosophy of prayer. On the other hand, others, seeing that there was nothing to hinder this —as there certainly is not if the action in relation to Professor Max Miller be legal—may have become desirous to find some countervailing influence in the help to be derived from the services of Protestant Dissenters. It was altogether a great question which Dean Stanley had opened, and one which could not be summarily settled. It must be said, however, that the general effect was to retard rather than promote the movement for the interchange of pulpits between Churchmen and Dissenters. It certainly showed the latter—with the exception of a very few who cling to the possible alliance between those who hold what has been called the common faith of Christendom,' by which is meant the ordinary Evangelical creed—that if this was to result in the admission of Nonconformists to the pulpits of the Establishment, the privilege must be shared with those whose beliefs were of a very dif- ferent character. Se far as it helped to dispel any illusion that Evan- gelical Dissenters might be able to secure some special advantages in a Church which still remains the National Church, it was exceedingly fortunate. There are not many who have indulged in such a dream, but it is well that even this small number should see the real state of the case. It is simply impossible to open the door so wide as to admit to these occasional services Nonconformists whose doctrines are not specially objectionable, and who, in addition, are free from the contami- nation of politics, and the sin of speaking or writing against the Establishment. Law must be maintained in its integrity, or liberty recognised to the fullest extent. If the individual preferences of clergy- men are to determine in whose favour the law may be relaxed, the consequences may be more serious than are at present apparent."
We are not able to get at any clear meaning in the last sen- tences of this passage, but we suppose the writer intends to say that a comprehensive National Church, such as the Dean of Westminster desires, would give facilities which are not given by Churches entirely separated from the State, for the preaching of anti-Christian doctrines, a conclusion which is entirely contradicted by the facts of the history of Christianity. And when Mr. Rogers insists on the impossibility which simple-minded "outsiders" like himself find in the continued acquiescence of so many of the clergy in formularies—of which, of course, the Athanasian Creed is the most flagrant instance—which they not only believe to be far from true and perfect, but even in some respects false, representa- tions of the Christian faith, we cannot but say to the orthodox Nonconformist of whom Mr. Rogers is the type,—Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. We grant that the actual incapacity of the English Church for either reforming its organisation or revising its formularies, and its existing practice of trying to hide this in- capacity under the flimsy pretence that nothing needs reforming or revising, are marks of a decay which must end in dissolution, if it cannot be arrested by some Heaven-sent reformer : but are not the beliefs of all the orthodox Nonconformist Churches em- bodied in just as inadequate and unsound forms, not excluding those which relate to the Bible itself? The man who is convinced that the wheat of true faith has sprung up in him may refuse to pull up the tares, because he fears that he shall pull up the wheat with them : but if he does honestly desire and endeavour to add knowledge to his faith, he soon discovers that the Christian faith of the Nonconformist, not less than of the " Erastian," is entangled with a variety of superstitions about the Bible, no less than about the Prayer-book, which he can only leave till the harvest.
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