THE TWELVE DAYS' MISSION AND THE BROAD CHURCHMEN.
ON Thursday, a "twelve days' war against Satan," as some of the High Churchmen who proclaimed it have ventured to call it, terminated in this metropolis,—not, we will hope, that a formal peace with thatpotentate was concluded, but only that the special bombardment with which his not inconsiderable realms in this great whirlpool of toil, pleasure, sin, and pain, have been during twelve days plied, ceased on that day, and the ordinary relations of normal hostility were resumed. In other words, there terminated on Thursday a twelve days' "Mission," daring which a great number of the Churches of this metro- polis were daily open for three or four special services, including preaching of a more popular and impassioned kind than usual, as well as, in some of them, frequent communions, and ritualistic displays ; the object of the whole Mission being to make, if possible, some definite impression on the mass of indifference, unbelief, and sin among that great and poorest class which seldom sees the inside of a London Church. The mission, it is said, has been chiefly confined to the High- Church party. At least the Record, and we believe the organs of the Evangelicals generally, have treated it with suspicion and aversion, specially noting with dislike the invitations to confession which have been given by many of the officiating clergy. Some of the moderately Evangelical clergy have, however, it is said, availed themselves of the opportunity, and joined in the assault on the practical heathenism of London after their own fashion. We do not find that the Broad Churchmen in general have taken any marked part in the campaign,—though more than one Broad Churchman like Mr. Ross, of Stepney, has joined heartily in it,—but one Broad Churchman, at least, has published an account of the impression it made upon him, that impression evidently eincluding a considerable amount of bewilderment, and not a little generous admiration. For the rest, the newspaper criticism proceeding from this school has been a little cold, with a good deal in it of perplexity. It is not, perhaps, very difficult to understand why. Of course, they would look on many of the weapons used by the High Churchmen as ad captandum. They would laugh at the processions, the gay clothes, and the incense, as child's play ; and they would not favour the invitation to confession,— though one of the highest of the High-Church preachers, Mr. G. Body, of Wolverhampton, who has been preaching in St. Margaret's, Cavendish Square, does not seem to have claimed any official power for the priesthood to absolve, or to have pushed his own estimate of the duty of confession to any extreme. He seems to have told his congregation that no absolution of the slightest effect could be given by any human being ; that Christ alone could really absolve ; and that be himself should not press any man to give a general confession, but would simply converse in private with all who wished it, on their most pressing difficulties, and advise them as best he could. That is not, one would think, at all beyond the tone which any Christian pastor, however broad, is bound to take. Still, it is not difficult to see why the Broad Churchmen have felt a perplexity in this matter which could not be shared by either the Low or High Church. The less sharply defined is the dogmatic basis on which any one stands, and the more doubt he admits as to this, and that, and the other item of what is properly regarded as his Church's creed, the more force is abstracted from his resources for attacking Doubt at least, if not also indifference and sin, because the more is spent in rooting about among his own thoughts for the distinction between that of which he is firmly convinced, and that which he can only accept provisionally. Take, for instance, the very name sometimes given to this Mission, as a "twelve days' war against Satan." Are there not numbers of Broad Church clergymen who would hesi- tate to speak with absolute confidence of the personality of evil, and who would prefer to regard 'Satan' as an Orientalism for temptation, at least as probably as a proper name for a universal Tempter ? Difficulties of this kind would beset the Broad Church clergy at every turn, in leading this kind of energetic assault upon popular indifference and doubt. This is a sort of movement which, if it be not impetuous, ardent, decisive in character, can effect nothing. A beleaguered garrison can only sally out with advantage when its enthusiasm is at blood-heat, and it has no misgivings as to its true duty and policy. Those who feel intellectual questionings and perplexities in relation to many, though not the greatest and most fundamental truths, and who cannot always approve of the method in which even those most fundamental truths are taught, have difficulties in undertaking a popular crusade, of which the clergymen who take their creed as a whole on authority, or the clergymen who adopt literally every statement of the Bible, know nothing. The Broad Churchmen cannot even use the sensation argument that if death come unexpectedly on the man who adopted the true creed an hour beforehand, he is saved ; but if on the man who has not yet adopted it, he is lost for ever. And not only will they find special difficulties in laying down the principle of authority, and in drawing a suffi- ciently exciting picture of the imminent and urgent peril of delay; but they will have to use discrimination even in explain- ing the divine truth of Revelation itself, which will not always fall in with the demands of a hasty and ardent rhetoric. For all these reasons we can account for a certain perplexity, half- sympathy and half-aversion, in the attitude of the broader theologians towards this movement. They see that Chris- tianity, if it is not to be both popular and aggressive in such a metropolis as this, is self-condemned. And yet they shrink from half the weapons which serve best the purposes of those who are most willing to give it a popular and aggressive form. We understand the embarrassment, and yet we strongly hold that if none but the High Churchmen and Low Churchmen can enter heartily and easily into such a movement as this, there must be a very grave deficiencysomewhere in the resources of the Broad Church. If, in losing the advantage of a neat systematic form, they have lost all ready hold on the popular conscience,
they can hardly claim to have succeeded to the possession of the Gospel which Christ committed to his Church. But is it so ? Can we not put that Gospel in a form which, while it pre- serves its essence, adapts it to the condition of modern criti- cism and knowledge, without any loss of popular force ? We, of course, do not pretend to any sort of command of the ora- tor's special skill. But a really able speaker might, we sub- mit, throw an appeal of the following kind into a shape as effective as any High-Church exhortation to the proud and wayward intellect of our pseudo-scientific age to obey the authority of the Church, or any Low-Church appeal to the gratitude which the vicarious sacrifice of an infinite Being ought to excite in the breasts of sinners conscious of their utter and helpless depravity.
The prevailing unbelief of England and London,' such a preacher might say, is usually of two kinds. It leads either a stunted, dull, leaden, monotonous inward life, or one of active excitement because only of active transgression. Except, perhaps, in the rare case of those who can absolutely live in intellectual study and research, the life of all, whether rich or poor, is very dreary, very, very empty, very destitute of permanent spring, if it has in it no principle of infinite courage,—or audacity, as the case may be,—if it neither lodges any appeal to the future against the tyranny of the present, nor rebels against it directly. Those who have the audacity to wage a regular war against others, whether by trans- gressing or only just observing the limits of law and convention, may, and will be, in some intense form, miserable ; but they will not be dead, oppressed, weighed down. They will have, at least, the due reward of active selfishness and evil, namely, sharp stings, excitement, struggle, passion, revenge, and hot life. But to those who permit themselves to be moulded by circumstances into the most convenient social shapes, the shapes of least resistance,' and who yet see nothing above and beyond mortal life, who buy as much pleasure as they can get in the cheapest market, and endure as little pain as possible ; who assail nothing strongly, because they have no strong faith, either negative or positive, to support them,—to them does not everything grow more and more leaden-coloured as life goes on ? do not the petty troubles of life grow overwhelming, so that here there will be suicide and there insanity, due to the mere unrelieved oppression of petty tasks, the misery of small debts and uncertain credits, the friction of uneven tempers, the vexation of unpunctual dependents, the crushing -embarrassments of a host of petty concerns half outside the in- dividual's own power, and yet unrelieved byany great horizon of eternal hope ? To them, death is the end, or the probable end, of every great source of human joy. As life goes on, great affections grow fewer, hopes fade, ambitions are disappointed, delights dwindle, and the pettiest concerns grow larger and larger till they monopolize the mind. The only escape from this is either into the active life of aggressive selfishness, guilt, crime, which is constantly making raids on the happiness and rights of others,—an escape from withering, to what must be self-contempt, and may, at any time, become torture, —or, access to some infinite store of courage, which makes mortal life independent of the changes of time, delivers from the pettiness of the present, and gives at once an infinite bearing to its smallest detail and an infinite pros- pect to its most fragmentary effort. Is there any such access ? If it be true that God is in constant and organic communion with our consciences, to effect this transposition of the little into the great, to open an infinite future to interrupted efforts, to restore and renew the broken ties of human affection, there must be. And if there be any clear evidence that a divine Being ever dwarfed himself to the pettiest of village lots in 'order to give us this faith, there must be food enough for the most unbounded courage, for the most daring audacity. Is there such evidence ? There is at least beyond all historic question, a nation which for thousands of years lived, as it believed, under the direct training of the Almighty, a training which made a servile people bold, and a sensual people spiritual, which was always looking to some great future of mingled suffering and glory, and which was always taught to dwell more and more on the transience of human life, the eternity of divine, the weakness of
sight, the strength of faith. And there was a close to this training more singular even than any phase the training itself,—when a working-man who declared that he was the Son of God, and that his true life was in God, living a public life of three years at most, without a single great follower, and without any precaution against oblivion, declared that he should be put to a shameful death, that he should rise again, that he should leave the earth, and that his kingdom should have no end. And this man's life was actually such as to create a new conception of human nature ; his death was what he predicted ; his followers unanimously asserted that they had talked with him repeatedly after it ; and they spent their lives in founding a society which has lived and spread for two thousand years, and lived and spread by virtue of the courage it has given to life, and the glory it has given to death. Is, then, this infinite extension of the sources of hope and courage unreasonable ? Is there nothing in the life of every man who has once fought seriously with sin to confirm so wonderful a story ? May it not be that the least sin is of infinite evil, the least submission to conscience of infinite good, without calling in the aid of any selfish superstition to sustain that faith ? Is there not an escape from the petty, murky, perplexed, intricate, soul-destroying minutia3 of London life, without launching into any life of aggressive guilt or selfish emulation ?'
We cannot help thinking that a true Broad Churchman, with the least of the popular orator in him, might adapt such hints as these into addresses quite as effective and suitable for a campaign such as that of the last twelve days as any of the High-Church and Low-Church appeals, based on a much more systematic and complete, because, as we believe, a much less sure theological fotindation,—and might do so without the slightest self-accusation of suppressing his own hesitations and intellectual difficulties as to the finer and more questionable affirmations of the formulas of our Church.
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