THE NEW PRIMATE. T HE new Primate of All England is
the one prelate who has officially congratulated the Church of England on that comprehensiveness which can find room at once for Professor Jowett's intense " love of truth " and Dr. Pusey's intense " personal holiness." He was one of the two who spoke in the plainest language about the narrow and despicable report of the Lower House of Convocation upon Essays and Reviews. " Of all the foolish productions which it had ever been the misfortune of controversy to call out, this, the production of a single individual, was," said Dr. Tait, " the worst, and more calculated than anything he had ever seen to injure the Christian faith." He spoke with the same straightforward manliness of the " melancholy " Oxford declaration that " the Bible not only contains, but is the word of God." In relation to the proceedings against the Bishop of Natal, Dr. Tait, while joining in that requisition which affection- ately urged the resignation of Dr. Colenso, " for the peace of the Church and his own sake," and " deploring " the refusal which that requisition met with, has always stood up in the manliest way to secure fair play for the heretic bishop, The new Primate has resolutely asserted that he still recognizes Dr. Colenso as Bishop of Natal, inasmuch as he sees no validity in the pretended sentence of deposition. He exerted his whole power at the unfortunate Lambeth Conference to prevent that disorderly synod from giving in its formal adhesion to the Bishop of Capetown's views, and he succeeded, with the help of the Bishop of St. David's, in preventing that mischief. In a word, there is no prelate in the Church whose policy has been so sincerely and resolutely in favour of comprehension in its largest sense, who has laid it down so simply that he considers the true bond of the Church to be the recognition of Christ as its spiritual ruler and the only spring of its unity, and who has shown himself so desirous to make light of all minor differences amongst those who can unite in this. Dr. Tait, then, has done all in his power to prove- that when he talks of comprehension he means what he says, and does not wish to fritter down the phrase into de- noting a general agreement with himself. He has shown no vestige of ecclesiastical sympathy with Dr. Pusey, but he- has expressed his sincere pleasure in being able to include Dr. Pusey in the English Church. He has shown no vestige of intellectual sympathy with Professor Jowett,—whom on many points he would hardly profess to understand ; but he has- expressed his sincere pleasure in being able to include Professor Jowett in the English Church. He dislikes the extravagances of Ritualism, partly from the natural instincts of his own plain and vigorous sense ; and partly from the feeling of the states- man,—the feeling expressed the other day by Mr. Gladstone, —that the clergy have no right to force a totally new mode of worship down the throats of a reluctant people. But he has shown no wish to apply the law in any puritanical spirit even here. We may say, without a shadow of reserve, that if any Churchman in England represents the sincere desire to stretch the comprehension of the Church over all of every shade of opinion who, while holding the deity of Christ, adhere- generally to the simplicity of the Reformed worship, it is Dr.. Tait.
But this is not the new Primate's only claim on our respect. With a thoroughly masculine breadth of view, he has com- bined a thoroughly manly earnestness of work. He has given himself with unwearied energy to the assault on the vice and ignorance and misery of his vast metropolitan see. Though_ in delicate health he has not shrunk from physical danger. He has been seen in the midst of the cholera. He has worked: like a statesman at the financial reorganization of his diocese. He has shown, in short, that with him breadth of view does not mean indifference to Christian duty, but the reverse. With something of the statesman in him, he has shown much of the true spirit of the missionary. With feeble- health, and a crowd of ecclesiastical anxieties on his- mind, he has brought a host of new labourers into the populous deserts under his care, and laid the plans for transforming those populous deserts into something which will, at least, soon bear traces both of religion and of civilization.. These are no small claims on the Church. And naturally- enough, therefore, it was of the Bishop of London of whom_ we were thinking when we declined three weeks ago to name- any candidate for the vacant Primacy, lest respect or sympathy- so dangerous as ours should militate against his claim. Believing, as we do, that Dr. Tait is not a man to show different phases according to his station in the Church,—to lose his. manliness and individuality as he gains in dignity,—to become- less simple and less catholic, and more enamoured of that peculiarly ecclesiastical capacity for "hedging," as Primate- than as Bishop of London,—we heartily rejoice in the firmness or the weakness, the wisdom or the good fortune, whichever it may be,—and we confess we do not see the fairness, in spite- of Mr. Disraeli's general shiftiness, of denying him credit for the better motives where we should unquestionably, in case of a- thoroughly bad choice, have held him responsible for the worse, —that has enabled the Conservative Prime Minister to make so- good a choice. It is true, of course, that Dr. Tait is a bitter and, as it seemed to us, unscrupulous opponent of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church policy,—as where is the Bishop, unless it be- Dr. Thirwall, who is not I—but in all other matters he has- been a steady Liberal, and we should scarcely have attributed it to virtue, even if Mr. Disraeli had gone anxiously out of his way to put an avowed enemy of the Irish Establishment into. the highest seat of the English Establishment. If we are to give even the Devil his due, we need not grudge to say of Mr.. Disraeli at least as much as this,—that if he had really had a_ soul, and had intended to throw it into the task of his last and most important ecclesiastical appointment, he would have acted: very much as he has done. We are told, however, not without plausibility, by some who have expressed moderate satisfaction in Dr. Tait's appoint- ment, that unfortunately the best appointment or the worst, of bishops, as of constitutional kings in these days, comes to very nearly the same general result. Officials of this kind, it is said, have very little in their power. They must act more or less in deference to an external form of usage and opinion which cripples their individuality, and reduces to a minimum both their power of good and their power of evil. Whatever truth there may be in this assertion, it seems to us to be adapted at the present moment rather to diminish unduly the very great satisfaction we have reason to feel in a good appointment, than to moderate undue expecta- tions of imaginary good. In the first place, it is a matter of the first moment that clergymen of almost all shades of opinion should know that the Primate fully recognizes the enormous diversity of view prevalent in the Church, and does not condemn it,—does not sympathise with those who would take half the clerical consciences in the Church to task for their interpretation of the Articles, and the other half for their interpretation of the Prayer-Book. A Primate who looks these differences boldly in the face, and welcomes them, will do a great deal to make the clergy feel that great scrupulosity in the interpretation of their intellectual obligations, is not a part of their duty,—not what that mysterious entity " the Church" expects from them. You cannot have. a better exponent of the Church, we should say, than its highest officer. If he regards this immense variety as a matter rather of congratula- tion than of reproach, the clergy may well feel that the letter of their engagements is authoritatively declared to admit, within certain simple limits, of a very wide and loose interpretation, and it will no longer be felt ambiguous if not low morality to give such a wide verge to the theological tendencies of the individual thinker. The new Primate, for instance, while disavowing for himself sympathy with the interpretation which Mr. Maurice attaches to the meaning of the word "eternal " in relation to eternal punishments, declared his hearty assent to that judg- ment of the Privy Council which admitted this interpretation as tenable, and declined to deprive those clergymen who accept it. More than this, it is well known that he heartily admires and respects the distinguished theologian to whom we have referred. Can any one doubt that the elevation of such a prelate to the head of the Church must tend to dissipate all doubts in the minds of clergymen holding similar views as to the honesty and candour of their conduct in remaining where they are ? Many who would never have been satisfied by the mere legal declaration that their views were not forbidden, will be fully satisfied when they find a thoroughly religious man at the head of the Church cordially sanctioning their position. We may say precisely the same of the scrupulous Paseyites, men who are half ashamed of the constraint they are compelled to put on the Articles to make out anything like concurrence with their drift. When the Primate himself, so far from regretting their presence, rejoices in it, though he does not sympathize with their peculiar views at all, they may fairly assume that if they are not breaking faith with him, they are not breaking faith with anybody. Nor can such a state of feeling fail, as we think, to lead to the explicit recognition by the Legislature of a principle of comprehension which is openly approved by the Primate, and therefore taken advantage of by men of almost all shades of theological opinion. The value of this result, in giving true freedom to theologians, it would scarcely be possible for us to exaggerate. And independently of the value of this direct sanction for a larger liberty of thought among our clergy, the effect of having a really catholic-minded Archbishop of Canterbury, must be to diminish the adventitious importance of dogmatic differences. A Primate who can congratulate the Church on finding room for both Professor Jowett and Dr. Pusey must tend to lower the false value,—the superstitious value,— attributed by the clergy to the differences between Professor Jowett and Dr. Pusey. The Athanasian view of such differ- ences (we do not mean the view taken by Athanasius, but the view inculcated by the spurious Athanasian Creed) is, on the whole, inconsistent with the feeling with which a Primate like Dr. Tait,—pious, able, energetic, self-denying,— cannot but be regarded by his clergy. We need scarcely say that we think no genuine theological distinction intellectually and spiritually insignificant. What we do think is that the importance attached to such difference is too often merely superstitious,—the sort of importance attached to wearing a charm, or obtaining an "indulgence," or appeasing Nemesis. The new Primate is not a man the clergy can fail to respect. He is not a man likely to hold differ- ent language as Primate from what he has held as Bishop of London. Consequently, his influence in the Church must be in the direction of really and gravely diminish- ing the intellectual superstitions of the clergy,—towards reducing differences of dogmatic opinion to just what they are worth,—serious differences on very important subjects honestly held by men of probably equal moral and spiritual worth, from intellectual causes of a great variety of kinds,—not differ- ences affecting or tending to affect what is called men's " salvation." If this result is satisfactory to the Record, we can understand its acquiescence in the new Primate. For our own parts, we should have thought that it would have struck at the very root of the meagre and miserable creed which that dull and bigoted paper doles out to its readers week after week.
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