THE CHURCH IN DANGER.
friHE danger to which we would call attention is not that of Disestablishment or of Disendowment. The Church which we would rouse to its peril, while it includes that which It may surprise some readers that we should speak of a
danger so universal as specially that of religious bodies ; it may surprise others that we should speak of it as a danger at all. The transfer of supreme rule, it is almost too obvious to urge, is a transfer of general temptation ; every one who seeks to achieve anything must be tempted to undue conces- sion towards those by whose help alone such achievement can be carried out. And those who fail to recognise this as a general temptation will be inclined not only to deny but to invert our warning. To bring back the lower classes to recognise as their natural advocates the ministers of him who in almost his last utterance called the poor his representa- tives, may seem an aim in which there can be no tempta- tion but that of inadequate response. Individuals, in seeking to associate eternal truth with temporal aid, may seek to advance their own fame or their own interest when they deem themselves advocates of the masses ; and such individuals may wear the livery and accept the pay of the Church ; but that any minister who may be taken as a typical specimen of the Church should be thus influenced, might seem absolutely impossible. Such arguments have a, cogency very inade- quately expressed by the epithet "plausible." Every one must admit that the Church is lost to the deepest meaning of the message she has to bring mankind, when she forgets their truth. The Church of the last century did so forget it—the Church, that is, which is known to Parliament—and hence the true Church found her representatives in men whom that Church repudiated and scorned,—in Whitefield when he drew tears down the grimy cheeks of Cornish miners ; and Wesley, when he organised the petty bourgeoisie of country towns into a great religious body, and founded what Macaulay laments as a lost Order of the Church of England. Wherever any religions body forgets that its message is primarily to the poor, it dissociates itself from the teaching of Christ. Till our own time it could hardly be said that there was any corporate danger, except that of giving this truth a sub- ordinate place. The warning conveyed in the command, "Thou shalt not in any wise favour the poor," has always had
'its meaning for individuals, but was applicable to much fewer
than the opposite warning with which the text associates it. Till the poor were the governors, there was no fear that leaders of men should favour the prejudices and overlook the defects of those whose worst calamity is their ignorance. But it is undeniable that when once the balance of power has gone over to any class, that class possesses the illegitimate as well as the legitimate influence of the ruler. The impulse which leads men now to flatter the poor is not a reaction from the influence which led them formerly to flatter the rich ;—an in- fluence to which no one will pretend that religious men were inaccessible. It is the very same influence. The depositaries of ultimate political strength are rich in all that attracts deference, even if they are starving.
If it be asked why such a danger should be regarded as
specially imminent with leaders of religion, it is surely a sufficient answer to point out that a low motive must always be most easily victorious where its way has been prepared by a high motive. Not that the high motive passes away. They who think that aspiring impulses cease to act the moment they are reinforced by motives of a different character, know but little of human nature. The reverence for the poor inseparable from any response to the teaching of Christ, lends its strength to an adulation of the many which is most in opposition to that teaching; it is impossible to analyse the compound whole into its elements, and what is least noble in it is most potent when it is also least predominant. It would
be easy to mention pulpits which are mere centres of political declamation, where no suspicion could possibly attach of personal interest.. No frankly political declamation is so dangerous as glowing political appeal clothed in religions phraseology. We find evidence of such danger everywhere; we would give as an instance, taken almost at random, a little pamphlet, attested by the names of learned and devout Churchmen, under the presidency of the Bishop of Durham, which does not seem to us a less significant indication of the peril we would bring home to our readers, because to most of them it will be probably unknown. Many of its aspirations are such as we can only regard with sympathy, but the tone of excited rhetoric throughout seems to us unsuited for the approach to what its writer describes as a difficult problem, and its most dogmatic statement condenses the fallacious suggestion of its rhetoric into dangerous error. A body of men "keenly alive to the disorder" (of our social organism) "and resolutely bent on its cure, will," we are told, "arrive at the discussion penetrated by two deep convictions. First, that the present situation is intolerable; and secondly, that its solution must be found in the unfaltering assertion of moral, as supreme over mechanical laws." An excellent prophecy of the probable prescriptions of well-meaning religious zeal, and a warning as to the influence of such zeal upon which all readers would do well to ponder.
There have been crises in history where it may have been well to preach that a situation was intolerable. To kindle the spirit of rebellion may be the better of two alternatives : it must be so if there has ever been such a thing as a righteous rebellion since the world began. But the effort to allay disease is not generally furthered by a preliminary declaration that the disease is intolerable ; and a true reformer will be as slow to use the epithet as a good physician. If, indeed, it be used of the present time in contradistinction to the past, we should say that its unwisdom was its least defect ; but we would not entangle the assertion of a principle, valid for all political or social reform, with any question as to matter of fact. It is not the condition of our patient, but the remedy of our physician on which we would found our protest. The "supremacy of moral over mechanical law" appears to us an unfortunate form of expression, even when it is true on the speaker's lips, and in the ear of an uneducated hearer, a certain falsehood. We can imagine a sense in which it might be used truly. As Mr. Tyndall says that gravitation almost disappears in the presence of certain molecular forces, so we could imagine a student of the spiritual history of mankind saying that material need almost disappears in the presence of certain spiritual emotions. But as we should avoid any suggestion about gravitation disappearing when there was a chance of overloading a cart or a vessel, so we would avoid any suggestion of material law disappearing when there is a chance of eco- nomic problems being settled on other than economic grounds. It is a strange thing that in an age of science, as we all might have described our own a very few years ago, it should be necessary to urge that knowledge of physical conditions is an element of success which, while it is most readily neglected by those whose hearts glow with unselfish desire, can never be replaced by such desire. A warning as old as the dialogues of Plato—a warning translated by Butler into the cautions religious dialect of his day, and emphasised by every discovery, every invention of ours—this warning surely, it might have been thought, need never henceforth be repeated in the ears of a race so abundantly convinced of its truth. Facts, unquestionable in our day, are perhaps enough to -show that that must never be said of any truth whatever.
The greatest difficulty in the way of helping the poor, is getting them to see that there are such things as non-moral laws. They know this very well in individual cases. They are aware that all the good-will in the world will not prevent two people wanting twice as much food as one, or help them to get more than two sixpences out of a shilling ; but they are always expecting to do something like this, when the necessities of a multitude are in question. More than a generation ago, the captain of an emigrant-ship, wishing to shelter the emigrants in a storm, shut them down into the hold, where no doubt they were glad enough to escape from the wind and rain, but where the greater number perished before they could obtain release, for want of air. Perhaps no one in his position would now be as ignorant of the requirement of the human lungs ; but to preach that moral is above material law, is to prepare for a perennial repetition of his mistake in regions where it is as much more fundamentally disastrous as it is leas conspicuously terrible. We are inhabitants of a realm of Necessity, which it is the common interest of all, Christians and non-Christians alike, to map out and thoroughly understand ; we shall not find water in its deserts, or food on its mountain-tops, because we are leading a host whom we desire to guide to a better land. To encourage them to think that the desire, if it be raised to a certain temperature, will supply knowledge and foresight, is to refuse to them a warning far more valuable than gold.
It should be in a special sense the care of those to avoid such a danger who believe that the fraction of man's existence involved in these delusive anticipations bears an insignificant proportion to the whole. But as it seems now to be felt that the Church must surrender her own peculiar strength of conviction, and put herself at the disadvantage of addressing the masses from the point of view of those for whom this brief lifetime is all, so by an instructive paradox the hope that has been her strength on her own domain, aban- doned there, appears as a source of weakness elsewhere. If Churchmen have ceased to believe that moral truth has an eternity of significance, while material truth concerns our threescore years and ten, at least do not let them carry over what remains of their own truth into a realm where it becomes demonstrable and pernicious error. That moral truth has a supremacy of jurisdiction and a priority of certainty over the sequences of material phenomena, is not believed by any one who understands what he is saying; but half the harm that is done in the world comes from the eloquent preaching of imperfect convictions. It is possible to convey, and even strongly implant, beliefs which are defied by every logical principle in the minds of one who diffuses them. It is difficult not sometimes to do this, for beliefs are tied up in very stiff bundles, and it seems often impossible to do more than get acceptance for that bundle in which there is least error. But surely the error we must insist on excluding is that which is popular for the hour,—that of which the mere translation into rhetoric is a clue to influence, wealth, and power.
Of the two great needs of our time, the first is the message of the Church,—the call to man to believe in God. The second is the message of those who have been, throughout the history of thought, in opposition to the Church,—the call to man to recognise those invariable sequences which have been called its laws. It has been the misfortune of an age now passing away that the last of these messages was received to the exclusion of the first. No mis- fortune can be quite so great, but with reference to it we may say, as with reference to the first commandment of the Jewish law, that "the second is like unto it." He who does not, believe in God may help his brethren, if he believes, consistently and logically, in the framework of external phenomena and sequence in which it is appointed that man shall exercise all activity during his seventy or eighty years of what we call life, though he can never give them what is imparted by one who consistently believes that these few years are a mere moment in our existence, and that when they end we enter on a domain where Moral Law is supreme. But the danger of our time, and in an especial sense the danger of the Church, is to mix these messages without fully and consistently believing either, and to distort a belief in the infinite mercy of God into a belief in the probable leniency of Nature. Such a confusion would. always work incalculable ill, but preached as a message to the democracy of our day, that ill is at its maximum. The masses are just taught to see that what they have always been accus- tomed to call "Law," is, in fact, their own creation, that, if they so choose, crime may be severed from punishment. They have also been taught to believe that he whom they have been accustomed to call God, is but a speculation of fallible human beings ; that if human law be flexible, divine law is altogether uncertain. It remains, if the teachers of our day transmit what they completely believe, that their pupils may yet learn to respect law in one region where, if it exist at all, it is unquestionably inexorable. Surely it is not by the agency of the Church that this hope for our time is to be weakened and confused We have no misgivings as to the ultimate result; but we do fear that Churchmen, in their hope to prepare a way for Christianity,
may sanction that leakage from Christianity which transmits mainly the prejudices with which many generations of erring men have adulterated it; and that, having brought down the ark of God into the battle of secular truth and error where it may be held by the weaker side, they will awaken to discover when the battle is over, that the ark is lost.
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