MR. GLADSTONE ON THE COLONIAL CHURCH.
MR. GLADSTONE, in the eloquent and interesting speech which he made yesterday week at St. James's Hall on the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, dilated with much earnestness on the vast resources which had been devoted -to the Colonial Episcopate between 1841, when there were only ten Colonial Bishops, and 1891, when there are eighty- two. He made a great point of the dismay with which even eight years earlier than 1841 the authorities of the Church regarded the prospect of losing for the Church of the Colonies the 416,000 a year at that time contributed by the State, but which, under the influence of the Reform Bill agitation, the Liberal Administration thought it advisable to withdraw. Mr. Gladstone, in the year 1833 or thereabouts, heard the withdrawal of this 416,000 a year spoken of as if it were an absolutely irremediable calamity. What was said was this : "Well, you know, if -this were a moderate sum, something might be done by personal contribution, but with such a sum as 416,000 a year, how would it be possible to do so ? It would be beyond rational expectation. The case is desperate ;" —whereupon Mr. Gladstone comments : "What would be thought of 416,000 a year now as a limit to the• 'subvention and the demands of this venerable Society ?" What, indeed P Mr. Gladstone is quite right in sug- gesting that the resources of English wealth for the purpose of providing subventions for the Colonial Episco- pate, are by no means exhausted even now, though the 416,000"a year has long ago been replaced, and a vast deal more than replaced. Yet when Mr. Gladstone hints that a great Church hardly knows the resources at its disposal till it has been forced to do without the help of the State, it is only fair to remember that the com- parative ease with which 416,000 a year was supplied, and a great deal more than supplied, by those who have sustained the Episcopate and Church of the Colonies, was in a very large degree due to resources which a disendowed Church would not have had at its disposal. It is quite true that the Colonial Church was fostered and enormously extended out of the voluntary con- tributions of Anglicans. But the voluntary contributions of Anglicans would have been very much smaller than they were, if those who gave them had been called upon to provide for all the wants of the Church at home as well as for all the wants of the Episcopate of the Colonies. According to a return just laid upon the table of the House of Commons, the total yearly revenue of the Church of England is no less than 45,469,171 from ancient endowments, as well as 4284,386 from private bounty received since 1703. If this vast revenue of 45,469,171 from ancient endowments had not been at the disposal of the Church at home, Mr. Glad- stone does not, we imagine, suppose that the loss of 416,000 a year to the Colonial Church would have been so easily supplied as it actually was. As the Nonconformists are so fond of insisting, and of insisting with perfect justice, it would be a very different task indeed to raise the revenue which is needful for Colonial and foreign missions out of private bounty as matters now stand, and to raise it out of private bounty as matters would stand if the ancient endowments of the Church at home had been devoted to secular purposes. In the one case it was only necessary to appeal to the generosity of a wealthy society relieved of the greater part of its own financial burdens for ecclesiastical purposes by the wealth it had inherited from ancient times. In the other, it would have been necessary to ,appeal to the bounty of a society already tasked to the utmost by its efforts to discharge the ecclesiastical duties and responsibilities of the Church at home. Great as the elas- ticity of the resources of the Anglican community has prow d to be in relation to the Church of the Colonies, while all this inherited revenue has been at its disposal for the Church at home, it is quite unreasonable to suppose that there would have been any such elasticity, if the same contributions had been sought from a Church destitute of that large inherited estate. It is quite true that the Colonial Church has not been in the least embarrassed by being cast loose, while the Church at home commanded these vast resources. But it does not in the least follow that if the Church at home had been deprived of this great estate, it would have been either able to help the Church in the Colonies as it does now, or, indeed, able to find anything like adequate resources for the work of the Church at home. It may be perfectly true that the great issue at present is simply this,—whether or not the Church shall still keep the resources which, but for its inheritance from antiquity, it would never have had. But that issue in- volves enormous consequences to the Church of the Colonies no less than to the Church at home. If the latter were suddenly impoverished, the former would suffer very grievously also. We cannot therefore agree with Mr. Gladstone, that the effect of political subvention by the State has been on the whole "to starve the work of the Church." Doubtless that was so while the Church trusted wholly to her alliance with the State both for her Colonial work and for her home work. But it seems quite certain that Anglican generosity to the Colonial Church could never have advanced with the rapid strides it did, had not her home work been supported by the enormous resources handed down for this purpose to the Church from the earliest times.
A very interesting part of Mr. Giladstone's speech was devoted to the way in which the Colonial Church, especially the Church of South Africa, has repudiated the decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as not binding on a Church which had no longer the character of an Establishment, and the angry surprise with which the Judicial Committee treated that repudiation as if it were "an abandonment of the English standards of faith and doctrine." Of course it was nothing of the kind. It may be arguable that an Established Church should, qud, Establishment at least, accept the decisions of the Courts of Civil Law as to the terms on which alone it can fulfil the conditions entitling it to the protection of the State. But it cannot be true that the decisions of the Courts of Civil Law are necessarily the decisions of the Church herself, as to what her faith and doctrine are. Of course it is one thing to reject the ancient creeds of the Church, and quite another to reject the interpretation put upon those creeds by Civil Law Courts entirely inde- pendent of the Church ; and the Colonial Church has cer- tainly done good service by repudiating that absurd doc- trine, and making it evident to all men that the great Anglican Communion cannot be bound by legal interpreta- tions which are in no sense the interpretations of the Church herself, but are delivered by lawyers who might even be Dissenters, and who, even if not Dissenters, have really no kind of authority to declare anything further than the legal conditions on which Church property is or is not held. At the same time, we do not think that Mr. Glad- stone is quite aware of the danger which this legitimate divergence between the doctrinal standards of the Colonial Church, and the doctrinal standards accepted by the Civil Courts of this country as binding on all clergymen who benefit by the Establishment, may ultimately cause. We all know there is a great tendency in the Civil Courts of this country to stretch the doctrinal standards,— we only wish the same tendency extended to the ritual standards,—to an almost unlimited extent. The decision in the case of "Essays and Reviews," no less than in the Gorham case, showed how strong this tendency is. But the clergy of the Establishment cannot live under legal condi- tions which make very light indeed of the traditions of faith and doctrine, without contracting more or less of the same indifference to doctrinal standards as these lay Judges ; and if that be so, we may very well have to face a split between some one or more branches of the Colonial Church and the Church at home on the subject of the true inter- pretation of these ancient doctrinal standards. It seems to us not at all improbable that, on such a case as the Colenso case, we might very well have a branch of the Colonial Church excommunicating the Church at home, on the plea that the Anglican Church has not excommunicated some prelate or dignitary of its own whom the Colonial theologians regard ELS heretical. And in a case of that kind, it would, we take it, be extremely difficult to find or create any spiritual authority to which as well the Church at home as the Colonial Churches, would be willing to defer. Mr. Glad- stone is quite right in saying that the Colonial Church has done us a great service in bringing us to appreciate the doc- trinal and ritual decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council at their true value,—nainely, decisions which may be binding on clergymen who receive the emoluments of the Establishment so long as they receive those emoluments, but certainly not decisions to which branches of the Church excluded from any share in its endowments are at all bound to defer. But great as this service is, it opens out a pros- pect of serious danger, at all events so long as there is no ecclesiastical or spiritual tribunal to whose doctrinal decisions both the Established and the non-Established Anglican Churches are inclined to submit. One of the great advantages of such a Court as that in which the Arch- bishop of Canterbury delivered his recent judgment in the Lincoln case, is that we might find in it an authority to which the non-Established Colonial Churches would very naturally be much more disposed to defer, than they would to that of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It would be a very serious calamity if the tendency of the Civil Courts to stretch the limits of doctrine till doc- trine means anything or nothing, and to narrow the rules of ritual, were to alienate the Churches of the Colonies from the main body of the Anglican Church itself. Yet that is, we think, a very likely result, if no spiritual Court can be found which both the Church at home and the Church abroad are inclined to respect, capable of tracing the out- lines of the Anglican creed with a combined seriousness and liberality that would command the reverence and submis- sion of the Church at large.
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