THE LAITY AND THE NATIONAL CHURCH.
CANON TREVOR'S letter, which will be found in another column, states with a good deal more force the argument which is contained in a rather feeble paper in the, current number of the Edinburgh Review, against admitting the idea of creating any representative Church body other than Parlia- ment,—which, as of course everybody agrees, not only is, but as long as the Establishment remains always must be, supreme on ecclesiastical, no less than political questions. Canon Trevor makes much of the fact, which we not only admit but insist upon, that the history and constitution of the Church show no trace of lay representation other than the representa- tion in Parliament, and he virtually asks how a great breach of continuity with history can be expected to succeed. Why, that is the very strength of our case. Thebbleach of continuity may be expected to succeed, exactly because, in order to give the Church any social or deliberative life, a breach of con- tinuity is absolutely demanded. The history of the Church shows no trace of lay representation except in Parliament, and what is the result? That there is absolutely no trace in the history of that Church of any mutual understanding betgreen its laity and clergy at all, and that now the chasm between, 'r'two is growing every day in breadth and depth. It is xCithing to the purpose to say, what we have never questioned, that the nation governs the Church, so far as it governs it at all, with a high hand. Of course it does. But how far does it govern it at all ? It enacted only last Session a summary procedure for enforcing the legal Rubrics of the Church, not only without questioning, but with a free admission on all hands, that a great part of those Rubrics are obsolete and inapplicable. Yet which parts of them were thus obsolete, Parliament did not venture, and a great many of its Members strongly asserted the incompetence' or at all events the unfitness, of such a body as Parliament, to discuss. Notice, however, was given to the body called Convocation that any advice it might choose to give on the changes needed in the Rubrics would be welcome. But what is the advice of Convocation on such a subject worth ? It is the advice of a body of clergymen who are competent perhaps to revise the Tables of Scripture Lessons, but who know very little, and who often seem to care much less, about the wishes or needs of the actual worshippers as to the observances of the worship. If their advice is given, in all probability Parliament will find it useless, and will adopt but one or two unimportant items of it, and will then be compelled, by sheer disinclination, not to say incapacity, to discuss the minutiaa of the ecclesiastical arrangements of a Church to which so large a number of the House of Com- mons do not belong, to leave all the other Rubrics unrevised, in the condition in which they came from the hands of the ecclesiastical reformers of the sixteenth century, to be sum- marily enforced by the new process Parliamentary wisdom has devised. As regards doctrine, the condition of things is worse still, and is already creating genuine alarm amongst some of the least nervous Members of the House of Commons. It is proposed to give the same easy method of enforcing doctrinal uniformity which has been enacted for the purpose of enforc- ing ritual uniformity. The proposal would be reasonable enough if the doctrinal symbols to which the Church is pledged were wide enough, and if the language in which they are expressed were sufficiently in keeping with modern modes of thinking, to represent in our own day what they represented in the day in which they were first devised. But the fact is notoriously otherwise. A great many of the Thirty-nine Articles are really but half-intelligible to any one but a thorough stfident of ecclesiastical history now. They neither touch the charac- teristic beliefs nor the characteristic doubts of the present day, but are conceived in a quite different mental plane. To give a summary mode of enforcing such doctrinal uniformity as they impose would introduce the wildest confusion into the Church. Mr. Kirkman Hodgson did not put it too 'strongly when he said at Bristol the other day, that this step would be equivalent to imposing new limitations of doctrine on the Church, and that if the House of Commons were to decide for him and his brother Churchmen what their doctrine was to be, he, for one, was perfectly prepared to say, 'Away with Establishment, 'away with Endowment!' That is a feeling which we suspect to be very general. The one indication of political feeling which our torpid long vacation has produced is a tendency to something like real panic at the proposed extension of last Session's Act to the subject of doctrinal uniformity. The good-sense of our people tells them two things very plainly ; first, that doctrinal uniformity could only be made a reality by recasting, so as to be intelligible to the present age, the articles of belief drawn up at a time when a totally different set of difficulties and doubts from the present were uppermost in the national mind ; and next, that Parliament would be more likely a great deal to undertake the discussion of the duration of geological periods and the characteristics of the Stone Age, than to undertake such a revision of the principles of theological comprehension as ought to govern the Esta- blished Church at the present day. If there is to be any possibility of reform in matters of this kind, it must be opened out by the creation of a body competent to advise Parliament of the wishes' not of the clergy, but of the clergy and laity of the National Church. Why, even the revision of the Table of Lessons, even the new facilities given in relation to shortened services, would never have been adopted by Parliament without advice which was deemed competent. In matters such as these, clerical advice was deemed adequate, and Parliament gave the permission asked for. But does Canon Trevor Eruppose that Parliament would have consented to debate even the new Table of Lessons on its merits ? If not, then, on any question on 'whichthe views of the laity of the Church are far more important than the views of the clergy, Parliament will simply decline to stir till it can get advice from a body in which the laity, no less than the clergy, have an adequate influence. But, says Canon Trevor, the Church is a National Church, and any proposal to represent any smaller body of laity than the whole nation in a Church body is an attempt to de- nationalise it. That is only true so far as final and compulsory legislative power is given to such a body,—which is not in the least what any statesman would dream of. The Church is national in a sense. It is the Church selected by the repre- sentatives of the nation to carry Christian teaching to all who do not voluntarily prefer some other form of that teaching, or who do not reject that teaching altogether ;—in short, in pre- cisely the same sense in which the Universities are national Universities. But it is not a National Church in the sense that all members of the nation are, as a matter of fact, equally interested in the forms of its worship, any more than the Universities are national in the sense that all members of the nation are equally interested in the curriculum they adopt for their degrees. Canon Trevor's argument would go to show that it is monstrous to give the Universities a provisionally independent influence over the course of education pursued in them, even while reserving to Parliament full power to revise or change that course. It stands to reason that, the Church being, as a devotional body, by no means commensurate with the nation,—and probably covering even nominally only half the nation,—those who do identify themselves with its worship are far more closely interested in its rules of worship than 'those who do not and never wish to do so. Of course, it- is most important that every man's means of taking up his right of membership, whenever he pleases, should be secured to him. But that is a very different thing from saying that a Jew, or a Sandemanian, or a Plymouth Brother is as much interested in the Rubric, and in the doctrinal comprehension of a Church none of them ever actually worships in, as are the laity who never worship anywhere else. If Canon Trevor's argument be sound, the laity of the Church of England ought to have no more organic influence over the forms and creeds of the Established Church than the laity of the Jewish or Roman Catholic, or Independent or Unitarian Churches. Very well; then surely it would follow that the clergy of the Church of England ought to have no more organic influence over its forms and creeds than the clergy of the Roman, or Indepen- dent, or Unitarian Churches ; and in that case, Convocation ought to admit to its debates the clergy of the rival Churches. 'That seems-to us an ad absurdum proof of the utter unsoundness of Canon Trevor's position. Indeed, it is so obvious as hardly. to. require stating, that while it is perfectly reasonable to give the Parliament which establishes a Church supreme control over the conditions of the Establishment, this not only does not exclude the concession of a certain provisional administra- tive influence in its procedure to those who actually constitute its ecclesiastical life but, just as in the case of the Univer- sities, does rather imply the wisdom of conceding such an influence. Parliament decides to what sort of Church it will lend a certain national aid. But if that is to exclude the con- cession of a provisional self-government to that body, it is likely enough to exclude the only conceivable condition of its use- fulness to the nation. Rules of ordinary municipal self-govern- ment are all made with the consent and solely within the limits prescribed by Parliament; but without such self-government municipal bodies would not be useful, but a perfect nuisance to the nation. Canon Trevor might as well argue, that because London and Liverpool are fairly represented in a Parliament which can at any time override the municipalities both of London and of Liverpool, London and Liverpool can urge no valid claim to municipal freedom.
Well, but how to define a layman of the Established Church of England ? We confess that seems to us a very secondary matter indeed. It seems to be easy enough to get such definitions, when once they are seriously desired. The Established Church of Scotland has one,—not the best. The Disestablished Church of Ireland got one soon enough, when it was wanted. There is absolutely no more difficulty in getting one for an Established Church than for a Disestablished Church, provided that it is well understood that Parliament surrenders no right of making final terms with the Church it chooses to establish, merely by conceding it the power of discussing its own affairs. We have never seen any reason why the register of the Voluntary Church-rate should not be taken as a basis for the electoral list of the Church. The desire to be rated would be a very fair test of the kind of interest in the Church which should properly entitle to a *voice in its pro- ceedings. But it is simply absurd to make of a difficulty which is not a difficulty at all for a Voluntary Church, a final barrier to that very much more limited organism which you set up in an advising body or a provisionally administering body. The main thing, to our mind, is to get a body somehow in which the clergy and, the laity who really worship together, or wish to do so, in the Church of England, may come to understand each other. As an Irish correspondent observes this week, any plan which brings the laity and the clergy together to debate ecclesiastical subjects in common, may be expected to do a vast deal towards filling up the rapidly-widening chasm between them. Any plan which proposes less than this is worse than useless. If the Church of England is to live at all, whether as an Establishment or otherwise, a mutual understanding is the first and absolute necessity. Nothing was more striking in the last Session of Parliament and the last Session of the Convo- cation of the Province of Canterbury, than the vast gulf between the mass of the worshippers and the majority of those who con- duct the worship. Canon Trevor threatens us with Disestablish- ment as the result of the creation of any new Church Body. But he does not make us afraid ; because the first effect Disestablishment would be to compel the creation of suet a body, and the due anticipation of the effect might not improbably avert the cause. Indeed, we are quite sure that, looking to the tendencies of the time, tendencies every year more potent and more urgent, a Church which is incapable of any reform, of any self-adaptation to the new conditions of things, must le disestablished. Now will any sane man assert that Convoca- tion, as it is, is either able or willing to undertake anything in the shape of reform? An utterly inelastic body involved in innumerable collisions with the thought and activity of this stirring time, is as certain to come to grief as the nineteenth cen- tury to come to an end. The alternative remains, either to devise some mode of gaining for it, while there is yet time, the kind of elasticity which would be the first result of Disestablishmnit, or to fold hands, and wait for the end,—which will not be long deferred.
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