LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE CHURCH DEFENCE MOVEMENT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." J am one of that large section of the Liberal Party which -has always desired that the question of Disestablishment should be left at rest as long as possible. Whether the connection between Church and State is to endure permanently, must depend entirely on the progress of opinion. But that, in the present divided and unsettled state of opinion, the nation should be plunged into an angry conflict on this question, probably -extending over years, would be a national misfortune. If, unhappily, this controversy should now come to the front, it must have the effect of indefinitely postponing the settlement of -many questions of the highest importance to the moral and ,physical well-being of the mass of the population. In addition -to ,this, I deeply dread the aggravation, by means of such a contest, of the lamentable and un-Christian bitterness of feeling -already so prevalent amongst the classes who think their interests or privileges threatened,—a bitterness which seems to have deprived not a few of them of all regard for fairness and even for veracity.
Entertaining these views, I ask your permission to suggest that the course which the Church leaders, with some wise excep- tions, are now taking in response to Lord Salisbury's cry of " the `Church in danger " is, of all things, likely to force forward the Disestablishment Question. For if the unprecedented elec- tioneering efforts now almost everywhere making by the Church should fail to influence materially the result of the elections, the Church will have made manifest her political impotence, and thereby encouraged her enemies, and stimulated them to immediate action. And if, on the other hand, the Church should show herself powerful enough to give the Conservatives a majority at the polls, the result in the end will be still more serious. The cry of "the Church in danger " having once been so profitable to the Conservatives will, of course, be resorted to again at future elections. The Church will be made the battle-field of the Con- servative party, and the nation will soon find itself in this predica- ment—that if it desires an Established Church, it can have it at the price of permanently entrusting political power to the party in alliance with the Church, but not without paying that price. In the eyes of all really convinced Liberals, the question of Disestab- lishment would thus be placed in an entirely new light. We Liberals, rightly or wrongly, have a firm conviction that the con- dition, both moral and physical, of the mass of the population, can be substantially improved by legislation. We think that much has already been done by Liberal legislation towards that end, and that much more may still be dune. We have not the least belief or expectation that any such legislation, when it may happen, as it almost always does, to trench upon the interests or privi- leges of the aristocratic and wealthy classes, will be seriously undertaken by the Conservatives. They may throw some -tubs to the whale ; but people who profit, or think they profit, by any system, are not the people to reform it. As well, for example, trust to the liquor trade the inauguration of -temperance, or to the London Corporation the division of the -endowments of the City and its Companies from City feasting -and City perquisites to purposes beneficial to the whole of London, as entrust to the class of landowners the reconstruc- tion of the Land-laws. The question, therefore, which Liberals would have thenceforth to ask themselves, would be not as now, whether they desire an Established Church, which many of them
undoubtedly do, but whether it is either on the one hand possible, or on the other desirable, to maintain an Established Church by sacrificing almost all that they regard as political and social progress at home, as well as by tolerating a swaggering foreign policy. That some sincere Liberals would adhere to the Church even on such terms I can believe ; but it cannot be doubted that the great majority even of those Liberals who, like myself, have at present no sympathy with the cry for Dis- establishment, would come to feel that religion would have more to lose than to gain by the continuance of an Established Church on such terms as these. Disestablishment would a little sooner or later become for the first time a strictly party question ; and the leaders of the Church should remember that never since 1832 has any great measure adopted by the Liberals as a party, failed to succeed in the end.
Though ecclesiastics have seldom been remarkable for politi- cal sagacity, it certainly seems strange to see the National Church electing to stand or fall with the aristocratic and wealthy party just at the very moment when the State has been turned into a democracy. Churchmen might learn some- thing by looking across the Channel. The Church in France, unfortunately, in return for certain concessions, identified itself with Napoleon III. Though this fact is far from justifying the action towards the Church of successive Republican Govern- ments, it goes some way towards accounting for it. In countries, on the other hand, where the Church is in sympathy with the democracy, we do not hear of much popular disposition to take away either the influence or the emoluments of the Clergy.—I
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