SOME CAUSES OF NONCONFORMIST DECLINE.
THE "Dissenting Interest," as it used to be called, is distinctly unhappy. There may be no public confession of concern, but its augurs do not smile when they meet, and the confidential talk of its responsible leaders is full of grave foreboding. They feel that they are making no real headway, and they fear lest they are losing hold of the new generation and the coming time. The militant Nonconformist has played a great part in the making of modern England, his grievances have been redressed, his conscience is dill a political factor ; but his old religious influence is unmistakably waning, and his position, in spite of uneasy efforts, grows every year more difficult to maintain. He himself is becoming a survival, like Sir Bedivere,—
" Among new men, strange faces, other minds."
He feels dimly incongruous and out of place among his own children. But he naturally fails to realise how the intellectual and spiritual currents which move in English national life are setting more and more strongly away from his own chafacteristic conceptions both of Church and State.
Thirty or forty years ago, Dissent was a stronghold of individualism, or, as it was then called, Radicalism. The elderly men, who are still the backbone of the Free Churches, were trained under the Manchester school, and they took kindly to the religious organisation which reflected their
political and economic ideals. "Voluntaryism" was their watch- word, on Sundays and weekdays alike ; they believed in free- trade in preaching and the unlimited competition of sects ; they opposed the Establishment as an ecclesiastical form of protection. But in these later days, the individual withers, and the State is more and more. For better or worse, the Manchester school is hopelessly out of fashion, and its dogmas are tossed contemptuously aside. Our new generation, of whatever party, is drifting rapidly towards a socialism in theory and practice, which would have seemed flat blasphemy to the founders of the Liberation Society, Mr. Miall and his comrades-at-arms fought for voluntary education almost as ardently as they fought for Disestablishment. Yet the cause of voluntary education is as dead as Queen Anne, and the most conspicuous eccle- siastical phenomenon of the last thirty years is the steadily growing influence of the Established Church as a whole, and of the High-Church party in particular. The old ideal of absolute religious liberty seems to have lost its charm for a. generation which is eager to reimpose State patronage and State control on all departments of life. The Fabian Society —that nursing-mother of coming Cabinet Ministers—openly doubts whether religion should not remain an organ of the body politic. The Pall Mall Gazette, shortly before its "sea-change into something rich and strange," declared, in a significant leader, that the " Zeitgeist" tended logically rather to democra- tise than to disestablish the Church. We may shortly hear a cry for ecclesiastical Home-rule, as against Separation. The same leaven of Herod which has infected advanced politicians is fermenting within the ranks of Nonconformity itself. The sons and daughters of the best Dissenting families. drink in social theories which implicitly contradict their Church order. The operatives who fill the Lancashire and Yorkshire chapels are being drilled into the methods of cen- tralised Trades-Unionism. What fellowship have such theories and such methods with the old Nonconformist tradition P Our modern drift towards Collectivism may be a strong delusion ; but it is plainly the popular delusion of to-day, and it is with equal plainness a drift clean away from local Independency. We may cease to marvel that the solitary new English sect which has emerged into prominence in recent years should W- as highly centralised and as anti-independent as the Society of Jesus. Moreover, while the theory of Dissent comes more and more into conflict with modern ideas, the practical working of Dissent is being seriously crippled by the changed conditions of modern life. The agricultural revolution, which straitens village rectors, is starving village ministers. The rural chapels which have reared such sturdy Puritans are being kept open with the greatest difficulty, now that so many farmers are only half-solvent, and so many of the best labourers year by year steadily migrate. The " Liberator " collapse has struck a cruel blow at thrifty Nonconformists, who formed the bulk of the investors. When, for instance, the people at one obscure chapel in a little Lincolnshire town are found to have thus lost altogether 230,000, it is plain that denominational consequences may follow this financial catastrophe. And while Dissent is so seriously weakened in the country, it is suffering in great cities from a different cause. The successful deacon—and deacons generally do succeed—always moves out with his family into some pleasant suburb. The really prosperous congregations are nearly all suburban; while the older and more central chapels are drained of the men who once made them possible, and are left stranded among dense populations of the poor. The "voluntary principle" —that endowments are evils, and that each separate con- gregation must pay its own way—breaks down in the poorer districts of a great city. How can you expect people to pay for religious work which most of them do not care about, when they often have not enough to feed and clothe themselves and their children ? Societies exist, among both Baptists and Independents, to help strug- gling causes in the country village and in the city back- street ; but those societies are utterly inadequate, alike in funds and in administration, to cope with the difficulties of the situation ; and the " Unions " have no authority whatever to do anything, except to discuss resolutions which cannot even bind the churches whose delegates vote for them. The Methodists, with their centralised organisations, are far better equipped, and are straining their resources, not without some success, to meet these changed conditions. But the elder groups of Nonconformists are in grave danger of losing hold of the poor, and of becoming, like the English Presbyterians, a respectable, middle-class, suburban sect.
Yet the Socialist tendencies in thought, and the new move- ments of population, are hardly so unkind to Dissent as the results of modern Biblical criticism. Conclusions which mode- rate and reverent scholars, like Canon Driver, agree on, may be taken by laymen as provisionally established. Now, it has often been shown that these results in no way imperil the Nicene Creed; but we can see that they do seriously undermine the traditional basis of Nonconformity,—which is another matter. For the Puritans, and the heirs of the Puritans, have always built upon Scripture as their sole and sufficient and supreme authority. Set a plain man to an open Bible,' they said, in effect, 'and he will easily deduce our conclusions.' Well, one initial result of criticism is to complicate such reference and to spoil its simplicity. Dr. Sanday is a competent witness as to the probable effect of his own teaching upon common minds, and he says with great distinctness :—" The use which good men will make of the Bible may be expected to become less simple and definite in its details, it will involve more research and more trouble, and less-educated Christians will perhaps pay more deference to the opinion of the more educated, and to the ordinary consciousness of the Church at large." That is to say, the Scripture is seen to be so complex that plain people will have to trust the critical experts and to accept the Church's commentary,—instead of exercising the sacred Pro- testant right of individual private judgment on the Bible.
Far more serious, however, is the effect of criticism in dis- solving away the ols1 idea of Biblical authority. We are taught to read the Book with other, if not with larger, eyes ; we are shown that, while its spirit is as Divine as ever, its letter is no more exempt from errors and contradictions than other ancient literature. As this teaching filters down to the lower levels of the religious public, it becomes a painfully searching problem for multitudes of Evangelicals, what new basis or buttress they can find for their trembling faith. Common men and women demand some plain, practical cer- tainty to rest on. The infallible Book was the dogma with which the Reformers could oppose the infallible Church. The Puritan fathers built their house on the literal inerrancy of the sacred volume, and now that rock is crumbling into sand. There are many signs already that as modern Evangelicals wake up to find that they can no longer rely on their Bibles with the old familiar security, they will gradually, half-unconsciously, gravi- tate towards some form of Christianity which claims historic descent and rests on visible institutions. When people generally mistrust their own watches, they begin to find a new value in the town clock,—that is, unless they give up trying to be punctual, in sheer despair. And it becomes plainer every day, that out of these critical discussions, while the organised Churches stand to gain, the unorganised Churches stand to lose more cer- tainly still. The critics themselves are quite aware of this result. Mr. Gore announces, with a certain complacency, "it is becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church." (" Lux Mundi," p. 248.) A sense of this dilemma has led certain prominent Noncon- formist teachers to emphasise the witness of "the Christian consciousness" as a sort of substitute for the authority of Scripture. But the Christian consciousness is a vague and, misty sentiment, except as it condenses into practical shape. The consciousness of a local Christian brotherhood dare not forget that it is neither the first nor the only manifestation of the Divine Spirit. Such consciousness only grows authoritative in proportion as it becomes collective and distinct, as it embodies and defines itself in the common creed and worship and fellow- ship of Christian generations. It becomes, indeed, a command- ingfact when it is expressed in the institutions, and transmitted by the traditions, and exemplified in the Saints of the Catholic Church. But a Catholic Church is the one Christian con- ception about which most Nonconformists have no clear, intelligible doctrine at all. Recent "Reunion Conferences" have betrayed a sense of this defect ; they are a sign. that the common-sense of many Dissenters is feeling its way dimly towards some refuge in the reality of the visible fellowship of Christians. We may welcome the sign, however much we doubt whether the spirit that yearns for corporate reunion is compatible with the old dissidence of Dissent.
Among English Nonconformists, the closer and more coherent bodies, like Methodism, will seem at first to suffer least from the new attitude towards the Bible, while the loosely-knit units of Independency arc already feeling the strain which presses on their weakest points. It is among Independents, too, that the results of Biblical scholarship are being popularised. and accepted most freely. And the very process of such acceptance involves in itself a, bias away from the original Separatist position. For the Higher Criticism emphasises the slow historic development of the Jewish Church. To quote the words of a popular Congrega- tionalist —"It betrays a singularly artificial view of revela- tion to assume that God could not have revealed things to the historic community in the quiet development of ages, but could only give a real revelation by telling every detail at the beginning." (R. F. Horton, "Revelation and the Bible," p. 81.) But that sentence sums up the doctrine of the de- velopment of Christianity, as well as of Judaism. Mr. Horton knows how to look before and after ; and he must be con- scious of the logic of his own arguments. He must realise, perhaps reluctantly, that in pointing his critical moral, he is destroying the old basis of Independency ; he is endorsing the instinct which makes so many Dissenters turn their faces towards a Christianity, which, with whatever accretions or corruptions, does still hold the thread of continuous historic development, and exists as a living organised society in the world.
In thus tracing some modern tendencies which make for Non- conformist decline, the present writer must not be understood to sympathise with them all, still less with their effect. They are certainly not all for good, and they will not all be per- manent. Reaction against them is a possibility. Resistance to them may be a duty. Bat, as a simple matter of fact, Dissenters are in heaviness through these manifold tempta- tions,—whose end is not yet.
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