PULPIT AND PEW.
MILE ordinary layman of the Church of England does not -i_ necessarily expect to agree intellectually with his clergy- man. He may or may not do so. He does not much mind whether or no. The Roman Church insists that a devout layman should agree with his priest; the devout Presby- terian insists that his presbyter should agree with him. The same may be said of all the Free Churches. The English Churchman alone is content to go his own intellectual way and to let the clergyman go his. The position has its advantages and its disadvantages. It makes for the dignity of both parties. A man with an unpalatable message is free to deliver it. He can speak his mind to his congrega, tion, "whether they will hear or whether they will forbear "; while they, on their side, retain their freedom of conscience. On the other band, it will be a very sad thing for the Church of England if the cleavage between the clergy and the laity becomes too wide. We think most fair-minded Churchmen on both sides of the chasm will agree that the sight of the gulf appals them at times. The duty of the clergy does not consist wholly in teaching the laity. It is sometimes their duty to represent them, and this, we think, is
the only one of their arduous duties which the clergy, as a body, cannot be said to fulfil to admiration. Now the ordinary lay churchgoer does not disagree with his parson because he himself is a sceptic, or even a heretic, but because he takes a different view of theological values from the man who has studied theology as an exact science, or who has learned to interpret it as a system of sacred metaphors. His common- sense almost always preserves him from the dangers of religious logical conclusion, while he regards the mystic soul of religion as a very real thing which shoold be always shrouded in reserve. The spirit of the Prayer Book is a lay spirit. That is why the layman loves it, and has clung to it in spite of all the changes of opinion through which be has passed in three hundred years. But the spirit of its surpliced interpreters is often foreign to its essential aim of compre- hension, and foreign to that typically English tendency to compromise, which it embodies occasionally, no doubt, at the risk of verbal inconsistency.
For our own part, we think there will always be a danger of wide difference in point of view between the ministers of an Established Church and their congregations. The man who takes his degree in Divinity and the man who takes religion for granted are not likely to see quite eye to eye. True religion runs a far greater risk when either party is allowed to terrorize the other. In like manner, the points of view of doctor and patient are never quite identical. But if there must always be a sort of mental gap between the ecclesiastic and the lay Churchman, it behoves the whole Church, on both sides of the gulf, to see that it is not too wide to be bridged, so that men may pass easily over, and each company be kept in sympathy, if not in detailed agreement, with the other. In the Church of England there have always existed a few clergymen who perfectly understood, and could give utterance to, the laymen's point of view, and from time to time we get an able layman who would seem as fully to grasp that of the clerics. Naturally the latter is more rare. All clergy have been laymen (though most of them were very young in those days), whereas very few laymen have been clergy. A greater power of sympathy and imagination is presupposed on the one side than on the other.
There is at least one prominent dignitary of the Church of England who completely understands, and is competent clearly to represent, the point of view of the average lay Churchman. We mean the Dean of Durham. He has just published a little book with the title Notes of My Ministry (London Hugh Roes; is. net). In this book be deals shortly and very clearly with a few subjects of "pressing concern "—for instance, with the case for the reunion of Protestant Churches in England, with the question of Disestablishment, with the Tolstoyan view of Christianity, and with the assumed difficulty of reconciling Christianity and patriotism. All these questions are keenly interesting to the laity, and the pronouncements of the Dean on them are typically lay. First of all, Dr. Hensley Henson states his faith in what he considers the essential dogma of Christianity—" the Divinity of the Founder" of the faith. In his mind, "a humanitarian or rationalistic doctrine about the Founder not only fails as a version of the sacred history, but reduces the whole Christian thesis to absurdity." This is a strong statement; but Dr. Hensley Henson refrains from metaphysical definitions of "Divinity," and admits that the Creeds as they stand are "partially obsolete." This belief in Christ's Divinity ought, he argues, to inspire "a resolute refusal to exclude from Christian Fellowship any who share it." He looks upon the present "isolation" of the Church of England as a terrible menace to her welfare—for she is "self-exiled from the Reformed Churches, not recognized by the Unreformed." The signs of the time make reunion almost a necessity :— "The pressure of the pseudo-scientific attack on that spiritual version of human nature, which is the postulate of all religion worthy the name, is felt to be too severe for isolated and uncon- sidered apologetics. The waxing demand for some better order- ing of economic life, which shall mitigate the sharp and shocking contrasts of industrial society, and interpret the social ideal of the Now Testament more effectually to the poor, requires for its satis- faction all the wisdom and concentration of thought which only an undivided Church can give. The urgent necessity for a restatement of Christian doctrines, and a revision of Christian methods, implies a domestic problem too difficult for sectarian solution. There is the old yet ever more insistent obligation to evangelise the world, which in the circumstances of the modern Church is seen to transcend all sectional efforts and resources."
He regrets the quick growth of ritualism, and laments" a dis- position to recede from the religious freedom secured by the Reformers" "If it be the case," he writes, "and I cannot deny that there is much plausibility in the argument, that the Church of England has in the course of the last century shifted its ground and gone far to change its character, so that an English. man proud of his national traditions, and deeply convinced as he must needs be that no part of those traditions is more worthy his regard than that which makes him glory in the Reformation, may well doubt the competence of the Established Church to express the genuine convictions and ideals of the English People, is it not to be explained by the fact that Noncon- formity has withdrawn from the national system precisely those elements which would have restored the balance, and rectified the perspective of Anglicanism ? "
In times of secular prosperity "there is little value attached to the Manly Creed of Liberty. Men weary of a version of their religious duty which is too austere, lofty, and virile for their languid concern; and they turn themselves readily to the nearer and easier demands of an accommodating Church." In spite of his fervent wish to reinclude the Nonconformists within the pale of the National Church, the Dean of Durham is opposed to Disestablishment. The Church has gained, in his belief, by her connexion with the State, and the State has gained immeasurably. "The Church of England as an Estab- lished Church preserves the idea of National Christianity, and possesses the framework of a National organization of Christianity. Potentially we have in that Churoh an instru- ment of religious unification, which may at any moment become of the utmost actual value."
Our author has little sympathy with the modern interpre- tation of Christ's teaching, which runs counter to utilitarian ethics, and which would, in the Dean's eyes, commit His disciples "to an anti-social indifference to secular interests." He is certain of an absolute distinction between public and personal morality. Any State which ignored the difference would entangle itself in hopeless difficulty, he preaches. "The error of the Tolstoyan is hardly less grave, and certainly not less mischievous, than that of the Crusader." It has always pleased the sceptic, he declares, to interpret the New Testament in a literal sense, and to exalt it in its literal interpretation :—
"If but Christianity may be thrust outside the main stream of human life, and stamped with a character of morose, or visionary, or frankly irrational sectarianism, it can count on toleration, and even compliment; but let it advance its true and irreducible claim to be the principle and enabling power of good citizenship, the light of human life, the salt of human society, the key to the right use of the whole heritage of Science, Art and Wisdom, the truth by which men may guide their steps through the world, and it wakes against itself every form of opposition, and every measure of dislike."
It would not be difficult to imagine a refutation of this strong condemnation of a school of thought. It would, for example, be possible to quote Dr. Henson'a own words against him- self, and say with a certain measure of plausibility that the ethics of Christianity are at least as little susceptible of rationalistic explanation as its dogma. But whether the Dean proves his case or not, he gives words to the thought of the average Christian layman—for whose point of view he
stands.
In much the same spirit of robust good sense he refutes the notion that patriotism forms no part of Christianity. While admitting the essential incompatibility of the Roman form of patriotism, in the first decades of the Christian era, with the teaching of the early Christians, be points out that Christ loved Jerusalem and that St. Paul almost overstated the claims of the State. " Patriotism," he says, "is a natural sentiment which belongs to the perfection of human character; therefore, Christianity mast needs authenticate it, and include it in its scheme of individual morality." Still further he goes with the natural man upon the road of common-sense. "Again, it is not, in my judgment, to be denied that Christianity becomes anti-patriotic if it becomes anti-national ; that it did become anti-national at the close of the Middle Ages : and has in the modern Roman Church become extremely anti-national in our own time." Is not this a frank and wise statement of the position of the Church of England layman, desiring, as he does, that his Church should be more truly national and
his patriotism more deeply religions Like everything English, the attitude is perhaps one of compromise ; not, as cer- tain carping persons will say, an effort to reconcile God and Mammon, but to reconcile the English and the Christian character. It is the glory of Christianity that such reconcilements are possible. Were it not so, Christianity would hardly be a universal religion. "To the Jews I became a Jew, that I might gain Jews," said St. PauL It is idle to deny that he touched a more essentially Christian tenet • when he burst forth into the splendid statement of Christian equality beginning, "There is neither Jew nor Greek." Such a truth as he here enunciates does not appear to the Englishman of to-day to be within the sphere of practical politics or to suit "the present necessity." The Dean of Durham's words do suit the present necessity far better, surely, than any High Church programme. Does not the extreme Anglican view come to this—To the Anglo-Saxons I became a Latin, that I might gain Anglo-Saxons P
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