The Church in the West Indies
[This article is one of the series which we have been publishing in connection with the Lambeth Conference.--Em Speekitord THE work of the church in this part of the world is as varied as the province is wide. The six island dioceses are peopled with white and coloured fOlk, and here the main work is done. It is an old- established work, no longer missionary in character, and it is built upon the old traditions of Colonial life, with parishchurches, parish boundaries, parish loyalties— so much like our familiar English life that if it Were not for the tropical setting, the dusky faces, and the 'almost sensuous fervotir of tbe singing,' you might imagine your- self, on a West Indian Sunday, to be worshipping in an
old English country church. You would be, too ; for nobody will reach the heart of the West Indian church and people who does not realize and feel that here, in spite of differences of climate and of race, a lesser England lives and flourishes.
This is, the West Indian church in her domestic charac- ter. She is English with many differences ; for her people make up a bewildering variety of types : lonely sponge-fishers of the Bahamas ; the remote communities of some of the outlying Antiguan islands ; the village lahonrers of the fruit and sugar estates ; the town-bred people of the ports ; and always the solid background of a white Colonial society, conservative and enterprising,
insular and with wide interests ; a tower of strength to their communities and to the church. All these arc, so to speak, the regular family. But the province has fascinating embroideries to its skirts. The Indians of the Central American forests, Chinese coolies, East Indian immigrants ; Mr. Abel's savages of Green Mansions ; the colours, tongues, and religions of the East ; and, touching these, modern industrial life in all its vigour, where the Church reaches our own people overseas, in the oil-fields of Trinidad and Venezuela and the scattered English-speaking communities from Honduras to Panama.
Our structure is characteristically Anglican ; but it has not been imposed upon a race which could have offered us a structure of its own. The Church opened her full work of conversion in the West Indies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The black and coloured people were slaves ; and they had been slaves for nearly two hundred years. The system under which they suffered had not obliterated the salient characteristics which they brought with them from Africa. They were emotional, volatile, humorous, affectionate, and super- stitious, as they are to-day. But it had obliterated their tribal life. For good or evil they had forgotten their past. For them it had perished. The only world they knew was the white man's world. They were children in a grown-up civilization, and it was a civilization stamped with the character and genius of Englishmen. The Church took facts as she found them. Her converts must be fitted into the only world they knew. They were a black phrase in a white context, and there they had to stay. And the event proved that our Anglican structure is much more elastic and accommodating than we often think it is. For there is no sign whatever that it does violence to anything of value in the coloured man's nature, or fails to satisfy his spiritual needs. So his church, his liturgy, his discipline, are ours. He makes a sincere and intensely devout churchman ; and you cannot doubt, when you see his devotion and happi- ness, and learn to know him, that wherever else the system might fail, here it succeeds, and succeeds admirably.
But to leave him there in church, chanting the decorous melodies of Hymns Ancient and Modern, would be to libel him as a mere imitation of his white neighbour in the pew, experiencing religion at second-hand. He is very far from being that. He pours into our traditional church life, which to us sometimes appears to be dead because it is sometimes dull, his own genius for religious experience, and makes old things perpetually new. With us, tradition tends to diminish our active spiritual life to a cold lunar radiance ; with him it is a living light. There is little more than a century between him and his forefathers' tremendous awakening. He is an early Christian, near to the first sources of the living Church ; and he brings to his faith not only a gift of emotion passionately sustained, but the vigour of a recent revela- tion. Thus he gives back much for what has been given him ; and,,chiefly, a faith which, however fixed in form, never hardens into convention, and a sense of personal contact with Christ in prayer and sacrament, which is to him as vivid as the sea and sunlight are to his eyes. For him the seen and unseen interpenetrate, and if this makes him still prone to superstitious usages, it keeps hint and the Church free from the danger of a formal and merely acquiescent faith.
This personal element has its lowlier uses, too, and binds him to his parish and his parish priest. Every West Indian parish is a family party, and the parish priest is the father of many households. He sits upon the summit of all their domestic celebrations as the honoured guest ; he shares their trials and their griefs ; he reconciles them when they quarrel, disciplines them when they misbehave ; works, walks, rides, sails, prays with them ; not because of " must " or " ought," but because if you arc a father that is just how things must be. Is this too close a way of packing souls and bodies together ? Not at all. It certainly makes life exacting for the parish priest ; but then every exaction is more than repaid by, fidelity and love, and an atmm sphere in which the faith can groW and thrive.
And the people give as they love, without reckoning. With the exception of Barbados, where there is still an establishment, the West Indian church is self-supporting. The S. P. G. gives what help it can, ,and what it, gives makes all the difference in communities many of which are disastrously poor. Without it some of the dioceses.— Antigua, for instance—could not make two ends meet. The white people give generously, but they are neither many nor rich ; and apart from this, the coloured people are the sole support of the Church.
Finally, if a West Indian may say so without vain- glory, the world might profitably go to school in the West Indies. For we are solving the colour problem. White and coloured worship side by side, and although we have not finished yet, we know that both races are learning a mutual understanding and respect. This is perhaps our greatest source of strength, as it is certainly our greatest service to the Church at large and to mankind.
JOHN E. LEVO.
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