DR, STANLEY ON SUBSCRIPTION.
DR. STANLEY'S letter to the Bishop of London on sub- scription may well date a great crisis in the history of our Church. It is not a religious manifesto on behalf of the " or any other theological school. It is a statesman- like political argument of the first order, which ought to tell, and we hope will tell, as powerfully on the most Conservative theologians as it probably will on the minds of the critics who think the geology of Genesis erroneous and the imagery of the Apocalypse Asiatic and obscure.
The central idea of the whole argument is the statesman- like assertion of Bishop I3urnet's, that "Churches and societies are much better secured by laws than by subscrip- tions; it is a more easy as well as a more reasonable mode of government." Now, we venture to assert that the more every school in the Church considers that statement, compares it with the history of the past, and applies it to the troubles of the present, the more clearly will it come out that this is the truth for the present crisis in the English establishment. We think Dr. Stanley emphatically right in separating this question entirely from the question of theological modifications in the standard of faith. We, and possibly he, might wish for con- siderable simplifiaations in this respect. The Athanasian Creed, fur example, is a scandal, as we consider it, on the charity, and an insult to the sobriety of the Anglican Church ; but the question of the expulsion of the A.thanasian Creed from our formularies is so entirely distinct from the question of subscription, and will divide so many who might unite on the latter question that it ought not to be in any way wrapt up with it. 1r. Stanley's pro- posal in the present pamphlet is to leave the standard or law of the Church's belief completely unchanged at present, but to sweep entirely away the principle of subscription, whether as applied to the candidates for the higher degree at Oxford, or to the candidates for orders and the incumbents of benefices.
We have got so much accustomed to think of subscription as the natural appendage of the clerical profession, that we have quite forgotten how few precedents history has to show in its defence, and how exceedingly bad those precedents are. The expedient of subscription is, in fact, an attempt to make the clergymen of the Church prisoners on parole, when no other method than that of parole could effectually reach one half of the moral opportunities of breaking bounds. The advantages of the parole method is that the restraining law, whatever it be, is by this means made, or intended to be made, an inward, instead of an outward, power' relying on self-knowledge as well as on external warnings to protect from the danger of transgression, and leaning, in fact, wholly on the conscience, instead of on the fear of consequences. Now, this is, of all other guarantees, the most dangerous for any complicated system of prohibitions, and, we maintain, especially and ex- ceptionally dangerous for the complicated system of doctrinal prohibitions included within so delicate and so rapidly varying a horizon as theological truth presents even to a professedly immutable church. The parole method of securing an obligation is only tolerable when the obliga- tion undertaken is exceedingly definite, simple, and easily performed. But, imagine it applied to the civil law of Eng- land. Imagine every man who becomes a citizen signing an obligation to observe even a very simple code of laws, such, say, as Lord Macaulay drew up for India! What could be the result, except a certain and probably rapid relaxation of the sense of duty attaching to these kinds of obligation—a relaxation which has certainly followed the method of sub- scription now obtained in the English Church. In short, - the inquisitorial mode of trying to identify a very com- plex system of enactments with the individual conscience, by requiring a man to pledge his honour to its observance, is one of the most ruinous which a civil ruler ever devised for increasing the authority of law. The only result is to break, by the strain of the pressure, the sense of obligation altogether, and to change a frank recognition of the penalties attaching to a careless or unconscious infraction of the law into a secret contempt for the whole principle of the law. If in civil matters the obvious wisdom of a great State is not to perplex simple men's understanding, but to bring home to them in each case by practical experience what the exact limit of their own rights is,—it is a thousand times more important that in theological matters, when everything depends on the freedom and individual ardour with which truth is embraced, that men should not feel their honour hampered by large, intricate, and ill-comprehended obligations, but should be free,—within the limits which the external ecclesiastical law might put to their energies,— to teach Christian truth exactly as it best came home to them. If there be propositions—like the malignant tag to the Athanasian Creed,—which, as Christian ministers, they feel they must preach against, they would then be, at their peril, at liberty to do so honourably. And if no one chose to enforce the penalty,—instead of feeling their honour soiled and their peace of conscience broken, they would simply have shown that the Church wished to regard this as an obsolete piece of legislation which is ripe for repeal. By this means the doctrinal standard of the Church would re- main intact, and an ecclesiastical prosecution would be the true and only remedy for the teaching of strange doctrine, as a civil prosecution is the true an-1 only remedy for an infrac- tion of our civil code. And while clergymen's consciences would be relieved from all the easuistries invented to apologize for modern subscription, a public benefit quite as great would be conferred, as Dr. Stanley points out, by taking away from ecclesiastical prosecutions, when they do occur, all the venom which mutual accusations of insincerity and dishonourable con- duct give. If a man is found to have traussTessed the civil law he simply pays the appointed penalty, and there is an end of the matter, unless he has also forfeited men's moral esteem. But at present a breach of eccle- siastical law is always accompanied by the bitterest recrimina- tions, simply on account of this futile attempt to fortify the whole code by pledging the personal honour of every indivi- dual subjected to it.
And what are the dangers in this proposal of Dr. Stanley's ? He shows us that for centuries the Church has worked with- out subscription much better than it has ever worked with it, —that up to the Council of Niema the notion never entered. any Christian head, and then first suggested itself as the "rude expedient of a half-educated soldier to enforce unani- mity in the Church ;" that the Roman Catholic and Greek clergy are not bound by anything at all analogous to our subscriptions ; that the same is now true even in many of the Swiss Cantons and Protestant States of Germany, though the national confessions remain for the most part "acknowledged and venerated standards of doc- trine ; " that in Protestant England the theory of sub- scription has only gradually grown up, and was not in the least contemplated by the great Reformers ; that the "
subscription" now enforced to the Liturgy is an altogether unprecedented device of ignorant bigotry, by which the lan- guage of praise and prayer is wrenched from its natural purpose to turn it into a dogmatic machinery, for which it is wholly unadapted ; and that the result of this attempt at enforcing uniformity has been to produce the most bitter and irreconcileable disputes. In what else could the clumsy at- tempt result to make every clergyman identify himself, as a matter of conscience, with above six hundred theo- logical propositions in the Thirty-nine Articles alone, and God only knows how many in the Prayer Book, to everything contained in which he is compelled to pledge his "unfeigned," but also very unmeaning "as- sent and consent ?" As Dr. Stanley remarks, the Bible, which has never been protected by any subscription from laymen at all, even at the Universities, and as regards even clergymen, only by a very imperfect clause included in the subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, which Dr. Lush- ingtou has recently declared to be consistent with the largest practical freedom, has retained a far stronger influence over the nation than any one of the inferences from it to which such complicated subscriptions have been enforced. Instead of truly protecting the Church from doubt, subscription has indeed engendered a whole host of doubts, by throwing men's minds out of the attitude of faith into the morbid one of hesitating scruples. "We have never," says Dr. Stanley, "been called to declare our belief in the grandeur of Isaiah, or the pathos of Jeremiah, or the wisdom of Paul, or the Divine pre-eminence of the Gospels. But we acknowledge this all the more readily, because we have not been entrapped into it by a legal snare in early youth."
To make a highly complicated law which men shall be expected to put in force upon thenselves,—and this is what a subscription necessarily means,—is always a political error and often a grave political injustice, for the truth is, that in the case of any law worthy of the name its true and legitimate operation can only be ensured by trained administrators who have passed the larger part of a lifetime in considering in what sense one portion of a code ought to be taken as modify- ing another portion. For example, here is an instance taken from Dr. Stanley's own experience of the result of a self- administered code of law, and what result can more com- pletely prove not only its faultiness but the actual mis- carriage of legal aims it involves ? "Of all the clergy whom I have known I can truly say that few have more exactly exemplified the best characteristics of an English clergyman than the Rev. Charles Wodehouse, late Canon of Norwich. He will forgive me if I go back to the days when I first knew him, now more than twenty years ago, when his kindly Christian courtesy and good sense won from me and mine a gratitude which can never be discharged. There was nothing whatever in his opinions or his tendencies to divide him from the mass of his countrymen or his clerical brethren. His sermons were orthodox, gentle, persuasive, manly. His parochial and cathedral ministrations were such as would have made him acceptable in any parish or in any cathedral in the land. But after a long struggle, commenced almost from the time when he first became aware that he had subscribed to formularies with which, in three minute points, he could not heartily agree, he gave up, at severe cost to himself, the positions in which he had led a happy and useful life for nearly fifty years. . . . There is probably, no Bishop on the bench who would interpret the danatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed in any other sense than that required by Mr. Wodehouse. There are certainly very few Bishops who, if asked, would not explain their use of the words of the Ordi- nation Service in a sense exactly similar to that desired by him. The difference between him and his brethren was simply that he had a scruple—as many thought, an excess of scruple—in making and continuing a subscription which the great bulk of the clergy accepted in the same sense as he was desirous of putting upon it." The only guarantee for any true freedom is to leave the interpretation and application of the law to lawyers, and this is exactly what the system of subscription seeks to prevent. And it is infinitely more important in the case of ecclesiastical law than any other; for the clergy have need of free consciences to produce any vivid impression at all. And how, under the weight of a few- thousand subtle intellectual and moral obligations, they contrive to seem, and, perhaps, be so little injured as they are, we can only explain by that great principle which Bishop Butler pointed out as applying to our intellectual and moral no less than to our physical nature, that passive impressions fade away with repetition, though active energies strengthen. Dr. Stanley has taken up a position in which he will be warmly supported by every true liberal theologian, by many who are far from liberal theolo- gians, and by all who know the utterly paralyzing nature of moral scruples. There are hundreds, and, but for the case- hardening effect of habit, there would be thousands, of clergy- men who would now say to younger men, hesitating on the threshold of the Church, "We would that you were' not only almost, but altogether, such as we are, except these bonds ! '
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