ARCHDEACON DENISON.
TAINE has, as far as we know, made no study of Arch- ITI deacon Denison. Yet he would, we think, have found in that dignitary of the Anglican Church a very much more typical specimen of English character than he has found a typical specimen of English poetry in Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh." Archdeacon Denison, the sharp, definite, authoritative Church dignitary, under- stood to be usually a ten-minutes' preacher, who loves a battle and loves a joke, and yet has been compelled, by his Church principles, to separate himself almost entirely from his friends, and stand nearly alone in crotchetty isolation, could not have existed out of England ; and in England he is peculiar enough to illustrate the ten- dency of some of our habits of thought far more perfectly than an average Englishman of the same class could illustrate them, because in him you see on the very surface the course of currents of conviction and of veins of habit which in other men, though they run deep into the character, are hidden by the reserve and what is called the common.sense of the English nature. The ecclesiastical personage who only last week seriously made, at a public meeting in Taunton summoned to discuss the founda- tion of an undenominational school, this declaration, "I believe the Conscience-olause to be tho invention of the devil ; I have not the least doubt of it," is a typo sufficiently unique to deserve a little study at our hands. And yet the key to the Archdeacon would be quite missed if we failed to see that this opinion, grotesque as it seems from a practical and experimental point of view, is not so unintelligible as it sounds to mere social intelligence. It is a very odd state of society, if you only come to think carefully of it, in which almost everybody is so terribly afraid of anybody else's religion touching the minds of his own children, that all the inventiveness of statesmen is exhausted in devising the most jealous safeguards against the clandestine or unconscious and unintentional diffusion of unwelcome religious influences. The age in which it was a political problem at least as important, as diffi- cult, and as delicate, to guard against the calamity of A's child hear- ing any explanation of B's religious faith, as it ever could be an important and delicate mechanical problem to prevent inflammable gas coming into unintentional contact with a spark, will, no doubt, be one day looked back upon as one of sufficiently gro- tesque characteristics. Nor has Archdeacon Denison himself any adequate conception of the oddity of this state of thing; though he does openly regard the Conscience-clause as the lase and subtlest achievement of the devil. For what he is horrified' at, is not the jealousy felt by a man who adopts one phase of religion of his child's accidentally receiving instruction in another phase of religion,—that jealousy he shares to the full. What he depre- cates so warmly is the parental indifference which will permit children- to learn anything whatever in a school not fully imbued with the precise religious teaching in which they have been brought up. The Conscience-clause is the work of the devil only because it is a device' for excusing to parents' consciences their real indifference to the- proper religious teaching of their children. The Archdeacon is sometimes thought to be the original of Mr. Trollope's Archdeacon Grantly, of Plumstead Episcopi. And no doubt there are com- mon elements in the two men. But to do the Archdeacon of Taunton justice, he is a much less worldly man than Archdeacon Grantly, who would have accepted the Conscience-clause, grumblingly, no doubt, but still without hesitation, as a matter of common political prudence and necessity, and would certainly have ejaculated, "Good heavens !" many times, if assured that in re- nouncing the Devil and all his works, he had renounced the Conscience-clause as the last and most malignant of them. The venerable Archdeacon of Taunton is a fanatic compared with Archdeacon Grantly, though a fanatic of a very peculiar kind. He has no belief whatever in "religious liberty." Near twenty, years ago he declared his emphatic conviction that the Protestant watchword, Religious Liberty,' was "a blasphemy against the- word of God," and that it should have been wholly abandoned- in common gratitude to God for the escape of the Church on the Fifth of November, 1605, from the Gunpowder Plot, and that the authority of the Church should have then been taken as the law of Anglican consciences in its place. To this he has recently added his perfectly consistent explanation of the duties of Dissenters-born—to remain Dissenters, and Dissenters of the very same creed into which they were born (unless, we sup- pose, converted by miracle, or something very like it). " In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred," said the Archdeacon the other day, "nay, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, the only religion which brought a man comfort was that in which he was bred up, and which he sucked in with his mother's, milk. As long as a man was fixed in his faith, he was very much in this position, to quote the words of St. Paul, I find mercy. because I did it ignorantly.' If a man picked out one day what he liked, and another day what he did not like, in regard to reli- gion, what service was such a religion to him ? Ile had never im- puted a wrong motive even to persons who did not belong to tAiet Church of England, and be knew very well that there were quite as honest people out of the Church of England as there were in it. In the name of God, whatsoever their religion might be, let them hold it absolutely fast, and not mix it up with any others."
Now, consider the very curious state of mind and character indicated by this position,—this advice that every one, except possibly one in a thousand, should stick to the creed in which he was born as the only one he can possibly make any real religious use of,—a position perfectly consistent with the Archdeacon's other position that the boast of "religious liberty" is a sort of " blasphemy " against the Providence which places you under a definite spiritual authority from your birth upwards. This is a posi- tion which implies an utter despair of obtaining any teat of truth, which makes truth to consist,—at least in this life, and for each individual,—in the most rigid fidelity to the spiritual habits of youth,—and which places an Anglican, therefore, in relation to other forms of Christian truth around him, just in the same sort of position in which, socially speaking, a squire, as such, stands to' a tradesman, or artisan, or farmer, or labourer. As such a one may be grateful for being born in comparatively affluent circumstances, and ought to be compassionate, and even generous, to those who are born in less affluent circumstances, but should never try to make the latter discontented with their providential position in society; so an Anglican should be grateful for being born an Anglican and not a Dissenter, but should never attempt to make a Dissenter into an Anglican, for what he has "sucked in with his mother's milk," that and that alone can really come out in his life. Thus religious truth, for this world at least and the inhabitants of it, is not one, but many ; some may have more of it than others, but this they can never know till they get rid of the fixed habits by which alone they can assimilate it. As some are born in the ranks of the aria-
toeracy, others in the ranks of menial labour, and the one position may be better (happier) than the other, but could not be better for one not born to it, so there may be ranks of spiritual faith, but one rank is not usually accessible to any born in another rank. All you can do is to make the best of the religious 'position to which it has pleased God to call you.
And of course this quaint ecclesiastical fatalism has a very marked effect on the character of the venerable dignitary who carries it out so consistently. He thinks it very wrong not to teach and to learn thoroughly the creed into which you were born. And he hits very hard at the faithlessness of those who neglect this. But then he is also painfully aware that he is liable to be hit very hard in return by those who cannot see that a hundred different types of faith, all equally true to those who are educated into them, can hardly command a people's deepest reverence ; and while his theory is that he ought to expect such hitting, and nob to mind it, his practice is to mind it very much, and to shrink as sensitively from it as a nobleman does when told by a plebeian that the accident of birth cannot be intrinsically sacred, The Arch- deacon told the Vicar of St. Mary's, Taunton, the other day, "One is always hitting right and left in debate, and one must take hits in return," but no sooner did it come to be his turn to "take hits," than he showed himself sore at every touch, and so often threatened to dissolve the meeting, that miscella- neous members of it protested loudly against his needless sensitiveness and his multiplied interruptions. And this is precisely what we should expect from a religious theory which grounds the individual creed so completely on personal position and habit, as to make faith a mere domestic tradition. On the one hand, such a view conduces to a dogged John-Bullish tenacity of creed, for it exempts the holder of it from any necessity for making sure of his grounds and justifications. On the other hand, there is something so startling in this proposition, that of a hundred creeds of which at least ninety-nine must be in error in relation to any distinct point of doctrine, each must be exhaust- ively taught, and taught without any sort of compromise to these who are born, as it were, under its start—that the man who holds it, however tenaciously he may fortify himself in the customary home of his spiritual habits, is constantly smarting under the sense of the paradox of his position, and wincing at every vivid delineation of it. And nothing can be more amusing than to watch the action and reaction of this system on Arch- deacon Denison. When he alone is speaking you seem to see the easy, tenacious, indomitable, wilful Englishman whom nothing can stir from his position, who gives blows rather recklessly and takes them cheerfully, who even in the spiritual region is seine- thing of the goodnatureer pugilist, expecting to be attacked, ready for self-defence, and almost unable to yield to an antagonist, even if he could. ever think himself beaten. But when another is assailing him, you see, on the contrary, the aensitive, restless anxiety of a man who knows how vulnerable his position is, in spite of his theory, and who, though he pretends he does not need any justification at all for insisting that it is his sacred duty to teach all he has himself believed from childhood to every child he is permitted to teach, yet cannot help perceiving, against his own will, the oddity of his theory, and feeling the weakness he will not recognize. While you cannot help respecting the burliness of the Churchman, who not only confesses his certainty that the Conscience-clause is the invention of the devil, but has had his name "erased from the books of the University of Oxford," because, by dispensing with denominational tests, that Li uiversity has become "an irreligious body," you cannot help pitying the complete inability to enter into the minds of others which causes the curious soreness of this same burly Churchman when subjected to criticism.
What, for instance, can be more thoroughly manly, burly, and English in the best sense than the following, from the Archdeacon's speech at Taunton ?—" There was not much despotic authority remaining in this country at the present time; and, perhaps, that was a very happy thing. But there was one thing despotic re- maining till, and that was the authority of the chairman of a meeting. He was sometimes knocked down at a meeting himself, and he was glad of it afterwards. But they had met there to con- sider an important public question, apart from any personal matters whatever ; and that was the reason he had come there, notwithstanding that he had been asked by a great number of friends not to do so.. If, instead of the mild and gentle address sent to him, he had been told that people would have met him on the bridge to shy him into the river, he believed he should have come all the same ; and, more than that, he believed that when he came to the bridge, instead of carrying out their threat they would have ;Wowed him to go by unmolested." And on the other
hand, what can be weaker or more indicative of nervous inability to sustain his own case than those perpetual interruptions of his from the chair, to the effect that "he could not allow that sort of thing to be stated," that "the speaker was not justified in coming to any such conclusion," that he would dissolve the meeting if there was another personal allusion, and so forth, with which the venerable Archdeacon continuously interlarded his adversary's very moderate speech ?
The truth is, that except under criticism Archdeacon Denison really manages to confine his gaze to the system he has imbibed at every pore during his whole life, and while he can do so, he is happy and strong ; but he cannot do so while he opens his ears to remarks the force of which every intelligent man must appreciate,—and the Archdeacon would be thoroughly intelligent, but for his self-fortified obstinacy of nature,—and, therefore, you then see the bold, cheerful, manly, habit-fashioned Churchman becoming the captious, impatient, almost querulous controversialist, who cannot listen to two sentences without attempting to take a distinction with- out a difference. Such a strong tower of fixed habitual belief as the venerable Archdeacon presents to us in one aspect, and such a shrinking, riddled intellectual front as he presents to us in another aspect, would be only possible to an Englishman, and only to him under the very peculiar conditions of the life of a dignitary in a national Church which is yet in but a very modified sense the Church of the people.
Previous page
