THE CHURCH CONGRESS ON DISSENT.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury closed the Church Congress on .Friday weekwith a speech as optimistic as that with which he had opened it. He completely fulfilled the Apostolic precept, "In everything give thanks ;" and when he was not quite able to be precisely thankful for the ideas or words uttered, he con- trived to be thankful at least that they had been uttered rather than repressed. We are not sure that we can agree with !him even so far as this, at least in relation to the belligerent paper 'read by Canon Cartels, the Principal of the Lichfield Theological College, who, though he found himself able to be grateful for what the Dissenters had done in removing theologioal restrictions up to the year 1870, thought that vv-hart they had done since that time in threatening the exelusivenees of the Churchyards was mere unscrupulous aggression, to be resisted by force, on the principle which he quoted and very much misapplied from our Lord's words, "They who use the sword shall perish by the sword." He described the Dissenters as endeavouring to "desecrate" Church- men's graveyards, to pervert them "forcibly to secular uses," and !to " render them hateful in their eyes, as scenes in which discord might arise, where once all was order and peace." Dissenters, he said, "had much mistaken the young Church- man of the present day, if they imagined they were prepared to allow their churchyards to become either a football for the Liberationists to kick about, or a more agency of the State." Now doubtless the Archbishop looked on this as one of the unwise things he had heard during the Congress, for the free expression of which he was thankful, though holding it to be unwise. But -even so far, we can hardly agree with him. To our minds, Canon Curteis had much better have held his tongue, than have got the Congress to roar out its approval of his very warlike and not very reasonable sentiments. If they produce any result, it will not be to make Dissenters hesitate, but to make Churchmen fight. Sir Stafford lc orthcote said the ther day that no Member of Parliament was properly trained to his duty who was not able and willing to swallow the speech he had prepared, and we cannot help thinking that Canon Curteis was not properly trained to his duty as a member of the Church Congress when he let such a paper as this pass " the barrier of his teeth." What is the result of 'eliciting such ,a vein of sentiment iss the worthy Canon un- happily succeeded in eliciting on Friday week ? If the Church is to fight, and fight hopefully, as the Canon himself thinks it ought to do, against the demands of the Dissenters, he renders the task far more difficult by thus heating the blood of both parties. Appeals to the sword are sure to bring with them the temper of the sword. Canon Curteis must be one of those ecclesiastical " Cossacks " to whom Archbishop Tait referred so enigmatically in his opening speech, as the dangerous followers of the regular ecclesiastical armies. And clearly such irregular troops are much more likely to injure the cause for which they fight, than to ad- vance it. If the Churchyards could be permanently barri- caded, as the Canon unfortunately wishes them to be, against every form of heresy, it certainly would not be by letting the Dissenters know that the mere sound of their heresies is " hateful" to ears orthodox, and excites in Churchmen the spirit of violent disgust, but rather by insisting on the danger to public order of allowing conflicting religions to meet in the 88,140 place, and perhaps indulge there in a wrangle on their re- lative merits. We do not in the least believe in this danger. It has not shown itself in the public cemeteries, and we cannot con- ceive why it should show itself in the Churchyards. But here at least is the point to insist on, while nothing can be sillier than to insult and irritate the Dissenters by treating their religious opinions with a' sort of loathing, and intimating that appeal must be made to the militant qualities of the younger clergy rather than submit to such desecration. True, Canon Curteis appeared to be speaking rather of heathen or atheist addresses than of orthodox Dissenting services, when he used this strong language. But he did not limit his language to addresses of that kind, though, of course, he put them in the foreground. His real claim was that the national Churchyards should be reserved strictly and exclusively for those who are willing to use the burial service of the Church of England, and that the nation ought to forfeit its claim to the use of these Churchyards, except on sueh con- ditions as the Church of England, acting as a theological body hostile to heresy, may choose to impose. He evidently held that to bury the dead with any other rites than those of the Church was to turn the ground. used. for burying them to mere " 8001.1.• lar uses," and to " desecrate " it. Of course the Dissenters will justly resent this language, and it will tend, so far as one man's speech, when loudly applauded by a numerous and repre- sentative body, can tend, to prevent any wise adjustment of the contending claims, It is true that Mr. Thomas Hughes's speech, if it had been received with anything like fairness or favour, would ,have 'neutralised the unwise and bitter outburst of Canon Curteis, and perhaps something more than neutralised it. But it seems clear that while the large-minded speech was received with constant protests and interruptions, the narrow-minded paper met with the noisiest applause. Yet Mr. Hughes gave expression not only to the statesmanlike view which is taken in Parliament on this subject, but to a nobler and less sectarian view,—the view which it becomes a Church as such, rather than a sect, to take in relation to the religious issue itself. Admit, if you please, that burial is, in the first instance, a secular or even sanitary duty, which only becomes religious from the mode and spirit in which it is discharged, yet the question at once arises, which of the two is the higher mode and spirit of regarding this duty,—to insist that if not discharged in the way we like best, it shall not be discharged ha the national burial-ground at all,—or, when the Dissenter urges us to go with him a mile, to go with him twain ? Which best becomes the Church that has complete confidence in the largeness of
its own faith, to say to a rival Church, "Unless you accommodate yourself to our theology and liturgy, we will deprive you altogether of your historical right; to bury your dead here ;" or to say to it, "We offer you the free use of our own service, if you like it, but if not, then take your own ; and at all events, it will not hurt our faith to let you insist on yours, We are not afraid of the infection of your peculiar beliefs, But we should be afraid of depriving you, even indirectly, of the least of your rights, in the name of a faith which would gladly welcome you to all its best privileges." TO compare for an instant the pain which a Dissenter might feel at not hearing the religious service to which his own faith inclines him beside the graves of Ids relatives and, friends, with the pain which a Churchman might feel at merely knowing that the adherents of another religion are allowed (in his absence) to use their own forms of worship within the territory of the national Churchyard, ie to compare grave wounds inflicted on the deepest moral and religious feelings, with mere annoyances to fastidious prejudices. In thenne case, a Church which claims to be a Church for the nation, denies a sect or denonaination the free use of its religious rites within a national precinct at a most solemn moment, and worse, denies it in the name of religion ; in the other case, all that happens is this,—that a sect or denomination claims the privilege of confessing its deepest convictions, when no one liable to be offended by them need be present to be annoyed by them, at the risk that the rumour of what has been said may subse- quently cause a few painful associations to those who have really no more exclusive right to the graveyard than the religious sect itself has. It is simply childish to pretend that the former are not selfish in thus attaching far more import- ance to a very small and fanciful injury to their own feelings, than they do to a very great and serious injury to their neigh- bours' feelings ; and it is still more idle to pretend that that is the wise or fitting policy of a National Church,—of Church, namely, which should endeavour, above all things, to propagate its faith by the aid of that reticence and self-restraint which deprecate propagandism.
However, we are not writing on the Burials question itself, but on the temper displayed in relation to it by the Church Congress; and we cannot say that this temper appears to us as satisfactory as it seems to have appeared to our rather optim- istic Primate. Church Congresses naturally tend to Sectarian- ism. They cannot recognise duties which overleap the bounds of their particular creed. They are even disposed to think, as one speaker openly contended, that the only way of gaining Dissenters het° convert them individually to Church opinions. We should have thought that before you could dispose Dissenters to belong to the Church, you must persuade them that the Church has a larger and more Catholic, not a narrower and more sectarian mode of treating secular duties and differences of conviction, than is natural to Dissent, and that without this prac- tical preparation for reconciliation, no reconciliation in theology alone could well be hoped for. Dissenters must judge us by our fruits. If we are'more inclined to shut them out of privileges which can de us no harm in the world, than they would be to shut us out from like privileges —we may be very sure they will not see in the Church of England the Church of the Nation. It is because Church Congresses seem to us to make it year by ypar more apparent that they at least are sectarian gatherings, encouraging a sectarian spirit, that we feel it so very difficult to join in the optimistic congratulations poured forth by Archbishop Tait on the success of these Assemblies, or to regard them as in any way the omens of a larger and more truly Christian Church of the future,
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