PARLIAMENT AND CONVOCATION. T HE meeting of the Church Reform League
on Tuesday —by far the most important it has yet held—was ushered in by a letter from Mr. Gladstone. He recalls with characteristic satisfaction the fact that he belonged to Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet, which allowed Convocation to meet for business—" a gift which had been refused by Mr. Walpole on behalf of the Government of Lord Derby" in the previous year—and he offers his " sympathy and approval in tentative efforts for the gradual enlargement of self-governing power in the Church." There is a closer relation than may at first appear between what Mr. Gladstone helped to do in 1853 and what he wishes well to in 1897. The revival of Convocation has been the theme of much ridicule, and it may be conceded that the spectacle of an Ecclesiastical legislature taken out of its retirement twice a year and allowed to run alone for four days each time is not a very impressive one. All the same, however, the progress the Church of England has made during the last fifty years has its unnoticed root in the revival of Convocation. It gained thereby the framework of a legislature, and of a legislature which linked it on to a far-distant past. Without any legislature Church reformers might have despaired of effecting anything in the way of improvement ; with a brand-new legislature the disintegrating tendencies thus created might easily have become revolutionary. As it is, Convocation has exerted a force which has in turn been stimulating and restraining, and we see the result of this double influence in the present proposal of the Church Reform League.
That proposal is nothing less than to make Convoca- tion—a reformed Convocation, be it understood—a legis- lature of first instance. Parliament is to retain its powers as the source of coercive jurisdiction, and as the ultimate maker of laws ; but it is to exercise these powers only by way of appeal. The Bill drafted by the League empowers the two Convocations to make such laws as it thinks expedient for the Church, and then to submit them to Parliament for acceptance or rejection as a whole. The process is one with which the public have long been familiar. The charities, the endowed schools of England, and the rules of the High Court of Justice have been revolutionised by this means. It is not proposed to give Convocation any more independent authority than it enjoys at present. Its acts will derive their validity from Parliament, just as they have always done. But the i way in which Parliament deals with them will be different. Under the existing system Convocation frames, debates, and adopts a Bill to do such and such things, and then finds some friendly Member to introduce and take charge of a' similar Bill in the House of Commons. But in order' to become law this Bill must go through the accustomed stages of first and second readings, of Committee and Report, ' and of third reading. Not one of these can be dispensed with, and at any one of them the Bill may make shipwreck. Nor is this the only danger attending the process. The Bill, we will suppose, as it left Convocation was carefully drawn so as net to conflict with the views of any con- siderable body of Churchmen. But when once it gets into the House of Commons there is nothing to insure that it will retain this character. Amendments may be moved in Committee which have been rejected in Con- vocation, on the express ground of their incompatibility with that latitude of interpretation which alone allows men of large differences of opinion to work side by side in the same Church. But what security is there that the rejection of these amendments in Convocation will be followed by their rejection in Parliament ? They may be pressed to a division by some Member, say, of the Church Association, and adopted in a small House by the enthusiasm of one section of the Members and the in- difference of the rest. This is not, perhaps, a very probable forecast—though after the experience of 1851 and 1874 it is unsafe to predict that the House of Commons will never lose its head on Ecclesiastical questions—but whether probable or not, it has had the effect of creating a rooted unwillingness on the part of Churchmen to ask Parliament to legislate on Church matters. They prefer to let well alone rather than run the risk of making things worse in the hope of making them better.
The proposal of the Church Reform League is that Ecclesiastical Bills when adopted by Convocation shall be laid on the table of the House of Comtuone, and if no hostile action is taken on them, shall become law by mere effluxion of time. The effect of this change would be to leave the powers of Parliament wholly untouched as regards the acceptance or rejection of Ecclesiastical measures, but to deprive it of the power of amending them. In itself this seems to us a perfectly reasonable demand. It is in no way inconsistent with the fact that the Church is established, for it leaves Parliament as free as it is now to give or refuse its sanction to any modifica- tion in the doctrine or discipline of that Church. Not the slightest change can be effected in the Book of Common Prayer or in the Articles of Religion if Parliament is minded to say " No." The only difference is that in- dividual Members will be no longer able to propose one alteration in lieu of another, and thus to revolutionise the Church in one direction, while refusing to alter it in another. Any Member of either House who dislikes the Bill will still be at liberty to move its rejection. The only difference will be that, if accepted, it must be ac- cepted en bloc, and if rejected, it must be rejected en bloc.
What is the probability that this simple and reasonable proposal will be accepted ? That is hard to say,—harder. indeed, than it was only a short time back. There is certainly, we think, an increasing disposition in the House of Commons to let the Church alone. This new temper has more origins than one. In part it comes from the growing sense that Parliament can no longer cope with the work it has to do, and that it would be idle for it to attempt to take up any fresh work. Now Ecclesiasti- cal legislation would be eminently fresh work, for there has been none to speak of for more than twenty years past. In part it comes, we think, from a change in the temper of Dissent. When Disestablishment was supposed to be close at hand, the unwillingness of Dissenters to sanction any measures of Church reform was intelligible. They regarded them simply as so many desperate efforts on the part of Churchmen to put off an inevitable catastrophe. Consequently it was quite legiti- mate for those who, as they thought, saw their way to bringing this catastrophe about, to resist all attempts to defeat it by a side wind. Now, however, Disestablish. ment is no longer in the air. For the time, at all events, little or nothing is heard of it, and we can readily believe that many Nonconformists who were prepared to refuse any greater liberty of legislation to the Church when they thought that she was on the eve of obtaining com- plete liberty, will not be prepared to refuse it now that the nation seems for the time to have made up its mind that the Church is to remain established. A third cause in the growing disposition to live and let live in Ecclesiastical matters. Whether it be the result of greater indifference or greater toleration, there can be no question that things are done and permitted in the Church of England to-day that at the beginning of the Queen's reign would have Provoked prompt action on the part of Parliament. Traces of this temper still make themselves seen from time to time, but no longer in persons of any influence. The majority of educated men and the majority of working men leave the Church alone. They either care nothing about it, or they regard it as a force which on the whole makes for the improvement and comfort of mankind, and so has a fair claim to be allowed to go about its work in the ways in which it finds that it can do it best. Those who think this are not likely to feel any grave objection to the scheme of the Church Reform League. They would not be willing to give Convocation absolute liberty to make laws for the Church, because they would feel, with very good reason, that to do this would be to concede Disestablishment in a very one-sided fashion. But so long as the ultimate right of Parliament to veto all that Convocation may do is preserved, they would be satisfied. Nothing but actual experiment can determine whether the types of opinion we have enumerated are sufficiently numerous in Parliament to pass such a Bill when it is introduced. All we can say is that the prospect is very much more hopeful than it was a few years back. The fact that the project is enthusiastically backed by Church- men like Canon Gore, Canon Scott Holland, and Sir Walter Phillimore will appeal to a good many Liberals, and now it has in addition the public imprimatur of Mr. Glad- stone. For how much this still counts it is difficult to say positively, but in our own opinion it counts for a good deal. There is a section of Liberals and a section of Non- conformists among whom, as we believe, his is still a name to conjure with, and if they do not go along with him in feeling active sympathy for the proposal of the Church Reform League, his letter may still indispose them to meet it with active opposition.
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