THE DECAY OF EVANGELICALISM IN THE CHURCH.
THE Evangelical party in the Church certainly grows weaker and weaker with every year. The death of Dr. Bickersteth, Bishop of Ripon, is rather one of those events which recall to us how much of the past is really past, than one of those which remind us how much of the past has not yet come, to its full significance in the present, and will grow to something still greater in the future. The good old Evangelical of to-day may well say of both the High Churchman and the Wide Churchman, as John the Baptist said of the Master of both, "He must increase, and I must decrease." This seems to us certain enough, though we do not doubt that the Evangelical party is still strong, is still in earnest, and is still capable of doing good work, such as it has done before, and such as, outside the Church, the Salvation Army are now doing. But though we heartily admit this, and feel grateful to them for all that they do in this way, we cannot disguise from ourselves that the peculiar form of religious faith which Dr. Bickersteth repre- sented, is fast dying out in the Church of England, and not only in the Church of England, but amongst educated men all the world over. It is dying away as fast among the orthodox Nonconformists as it is in the Church of England. It is dying away almost as fast in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland as it is among the orthodox Nonconformists. The power of the most Potent of our present religious convictions works against Evangel- icalism, instead of, as it once did perhaps, in its favour. It is the Evangelical circles which are now most apt to become unreal in their religion, and the Wide Church or High-Church circles which find it easiest at once to apply their faith to practice. and to open their eyes to all that is going on in the
world, while they are applying their faith to practice. The Evangelical feels far more painfully than any other type of Christian that "the time is out of joint," and that he is hardly the man to set it right. Whatever be the explanation of the fact, we cannot doubt at all that the fact is so, and we should like briefly to consider why.
One of the reasons of the decay of Evangelicalism is un- doubtedly the stress which Evangelicals have laid on the doctrine of conversion, and of conscious conversion. Now, though it is unquestionably true that there are definite crises in all kinds of growth, physical, mental, and moral, yet it is equally true that the crisis itself is usually gradual,—one without date, for which it would be impossible to assign a given hour, or din or week,—and that the preparation for that crisis is still more gradual, and of a kind which it is impossible to separate by any hard-and-fast line from the crisis itself. The belief that even the most important epochs in the physical and moral life around us are gradually introduced, and are only half visible even when • they come, seeing that the most visible of the aspects they assume may often be the least important aspect, is one of which all the larger experience, and all the stricter science of the day have helped to convince us. More and more have we learnt to mark the infinitesimal additions of structure by which a new era of growth is prepared ; the half-unconscious changes in habits of thought by which a great rush of impulse is initiated; the increase in susceptibility to higher influences by which the predominance of the lower nature is undermined. No one denies the truth of vielent eruptions ; but we can see more and more clearly every day that it is the gradual accumulation of elastic gases at an intense heat in the inside of the volcano which prepares the convulsion by which these gases are- liberated ; and even in the volcano clouds of smoke generally long pre- cede the outbreak of lava and of flame. What is true of the volcano is true of disturbing processes in the soul. The smoke begins to show what is going on long before the fire is visible ; and who shall say which is the true crisis,—the crisis when the smoke first appears, or the crisis when the flame suc- ceeds it P No wise man ever attempts to date any great change in himself. He may date the first occasion on which he acts upon new convictions, but to date the moment when these con- victions first take possession of him is usually hopeless. That there may be cases in which it is possible, we do not deny. But they are the exceptions, not the rule ; and the very fact that they are the exceptions and not the rule, makes it most dangerous to regard them as illustrating the most perfect type of the formation of such convictions. It is, indeed, extremely doubtful whether convictions which spring suddenly into existence are so durable and strong as convictions which take long in growing. The oak is not so rapid in its growth as the fir, and the elephant is not so rapid in its growth as the tiger ; but that which grows . most slowly, is also the firmest and most worthy of trust. And so, too, it is with the mind. The genius which has been long in training, may come to its perfection almost suddenly, bat the genius which breaks out quite abruptly is hardly ever of strong fibre. The belief in the necessity of a conscious con- version at a specifiable date, on which the Evangelicals have 'laid so much stress, is a dangerous one, and wholly-inconsistent with the spiritual experience of the best minds, and this has told against the Evangelicals more and more as the analogies between the spiritual and the physical life of man have been better perceived and more frequently verified.
Again, the contempt of the Evangelicals for physical agencies as true organs of spiritual agencies, has worked steadily against them. More and more has it been per- ceived, especially since Wordsworth wrote, that physical agencies are spiritual agencies too, and many of them spiritual agencies of a high order. The notion that a sacrament must be purely symbolic if it is to convey divine influence at all; that the spirit is so far above the flesh, and the flesh so far below the spirit that they may safely be contrasted with each other, as the earthen vessel is contrasted with the trea- sure which it contains, has been shown, we may fairly say, to be false. Undoubtedly, as the mesmerist is enabled to gain a con- trol over his patient's mind through his influence over his body, so in ordinary life a physical influence is at once the expression of one kind of spiritual influence, and the cause of another and it may be even a different kind of spiritual influence, in the person over whom it is exerted. If this be so, in the case of the most ordinary agencies of daily life, it is not likely that in things divine it should be otherwise, and the distrust which the Evangelicals have always exhibited towards the sacramental side of Christian teaching, has undoubtedly tended to weaken their influence over men, as well as to prove that they only half- understand one of the prominent elements of our Lord's teach- ing. The early Church, which treated baptism as so high a privilege, that St. Peter eagerly claimed it as a right even for those who, like Cornelius the Centurion, had already received the Holy Spirit, had certainly little or no sympathy with the doc- trine of men who teach that a sacrament is nothing in the world but "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." And doubtless the tendency of the Evangelicals to treat God's grace as separated by the whole diameter of being from God's physical blessings, has done much, in a world which has more and more learned to trace the living connection between the physical and the spiritual, to alienate thinking people from the Evangelical teaching.
Once more, the tendency of the Evangelical party, in their deep distrust of human institutions and human traditions, to insist on the Bible as the sole organ of revelation, and to take the Bible in the most literal fashion,—nay, even to attach a cer- tain sort of oracular value to fragments of the Bible when detached from their context,—has been a very great hindrance in their way, in a world which has learnt more and more to value the results of historical criticism, and to see the mistake of detaching anything that you wish to study truly, from the cir- cumstances of its origin. Yet it is hardly possible for the Evangelical Party to give up this Biblical literalism, without also giving up their horror of the doctrine of the gradualness of revelation—of the slow historical evolution of that revelation.
To sum up, it has always been, we think, of the very essence of the Evangelical procedure to bring into the strongest and most absolute contrast "the filthy rags" of human nature, on the one hand, and the free gift of the divine grace and atone- ment, on the other hand. Evangelicals would hardly admit the possibility of any process of sanctification preceding con- version ; they would hardly admit the possibility of any- thing gradual and natural in the character of conversion ; they would hardly admit the possibility that the body could become the channel of God's influence over the mind, as well as the mind the channel of God's influence over the body ; and they would hardly admit the possibility that in the Bible, which they regard as God's book, and identify almost abso- lutely with God, there is anything really human, really im- perfect, really ambiguous, least of all, really erroneous. Thus their conception of religion is essentially a crude and abrupt one, which severs man far too absolutely from God, and ren- ders it almost impossible to regard any permanent relation be- tween God and man as possible at all except by a sheer miracle of grace, which it is the next thing to impious to pretend to under- stand or to bring about. In such a world as we have been living in for the last fifty years, such a view of religion has been growing daily less and less tenable, and we do not wonder, therefore, that the worthies of the-Evangelical type of Christianity are daily dying off and leaving no successors behind them.
Previous page
