- MR. GEORGE RUSSELL ON DISESTABLISHMENT.
MR. GEORGE RUSSELL'S speech cannot well be said to have been a speech on Disestablishment --in Wales. It was a speech in favour of Disestablishment s of the Church everywhere and under all circumstances, so long as the mind of a nation has been converted to what he treats as the absolutely righteous policy ; and he applied that doctrine to Wales rather than to England, only so far as Wales has already come to desire that policy; while *the mind of England has as yet shown no indication -of preparedness for so great a revolution. Indeed, the --speech was the first formal indication given by any Minister of the Crown that the Government are aiming at"Disestablishment all round." We use the word. " formal " because of course Mr. Asquith's speeches have all been firmly based on the same conviction ; though Mr. Asquith, as a Member of the Cabinet, deemed himself hardly at liberty to announce so explicitly and broadly what was the ultimate policy at which the Government is aiming. But Mr. George Russell came forward deliberately as a High Churchman, and also as a member of the Lreat Bedford family (though he named no names) to w3lcome the policy of Disestablishment always and everywhere, and more especially as the scion of a stock which had. profited greatly by the Royal grant of abbey lands, to do a sort of public penance on their behalf, and to reprove the selfishness of a race who, having been enriched by the spoils of a Church, now 'denounce for themselves and for the nation the sacri- legious policy by which they first rose to greatness, but against the rash repetition of which most of them enter a protest. This surely makes Mr. Russell's speech a very momentous one in the history of the Liberal party. If, in connection with his very happy use of Shakspeare's Henry V., Mr. Russell could have found anywhere a scoff at the nobles whom Henry VIII. made rich, it seems evident that he would have seized upon it as eagerly as he seized on that in which an Archbishop and Bishop of the hero of Agincourt are supposed to be expressing their dismay at the prospect of being stripped of the wealth which had fallen to the Church in more pious times, only in order to alleviate the miseries of those who are the poorest and most pitiable both in earthly possessions and in mental capacities. Oddly enough, the same speaker seemed to be now as eager to strip the Church of its wealth, as he was to taunt the nobles with the wealth of which their ancestors had stripped it. Perhaps he thought that by repeating in the name of democracy what Kings had done, or contemplated doing, in the name of their own self- will, the nation might be enabled to atone for the sins both of those who had established and of those who had de- spoiled the Church. For our own part, we should rather have expected to find the descendant of a noble family which had annexed property dedicated to religious uses,—or it might be, at that time, abuses,—would have felt some special scruple in repeating the attack on the Church at a time when nobody pretends that it is guilty of mis- using what it possesses to minister to the pleasures or vices of lazy ecclesiastics. But Mr. Russell evidently thinks differently. He is disposed to think that an act of spoliation which was in some sense palliated by the vices of the mediceval clergy, may be atoned for by a further act of spoliation which can be palliated only by pleading the godly jealousies of rival sects. We do not profess to understand exactly how Mr. Russell connects the atonement for which he argues, with the ancestral sin which he deplores.
But, at any rate, no one can deny that a great step has been taken towards the Disestablishment and Disendow- meat of the Church of England, when a Minister of the Crown, abandoning all pretence of grounding the policy of Welsh Disestablishment on the special circumstances of the Church in Wales, openly represents it as a first step towards a great act of justice which must end sooner or later in the complete abolition of a national Church, and its reduction to perfect political equality,—and at least a rough approximation towards legal equality as regards its possessions,—with every other sect, religious or irreligious. We are coming rapidly not only to "Home- rule all round," but to "Disestablishment all round," though not quite to "Disendowment all round." The new doctrine of Disendowment is Disendowment at hap-hazard, by fixing almost an arbitrary date with very little to justify that date, as Mr. Russell himself explicitly admits, after which what has been given by private gift to the national Church shall be regarded as given to the existing ecclesiastical body, while every- thing so given before that date shall be regarded as given to the nation for any purpose, secular or otherwise, that can be represented as likely to advance its well-being without exciting the religious jealousy of independent sects. Mr. Russell treats every interference of the State with religious policy as an indefensible Erastian meddling with the spiritual functions of a Church. But what can be imagined more Erastian than devoting gifts undoubtedly intended for the most solemn religious purposes, to the creation of museums or other innocent recreations, only because there may be, or perhaps must be, a doubt as to the precise religions functions which the donors, if still living, would, in this age of divided creeds, have designated for the recipients of their bounty ? Mr. Russell's horror of Erastianism results in the most arbitrary Erastianism, for it results in authorising the State, at its own discretion, to transform a religious endowment into the endowment of amusements or recreations which the donors, if still living, might very probably have entirely disapproved, and which the Church that inherited their gift has certainly never sanctioned. If that interference with Church policy and property is not Erastian in principle, we should find it difficult to apply the term even to "the establishment of a heresy or the endowment of a schism." The "autonomy" of the Church is as much subverted by the one interference of the State as by the other. Mr. Russell appears to think, however, that a Church should suffer injustice gladly in the hope that such injustice will stimulate its enthusiasm and restore its doctrinal independence. As to the former consequence of Disestablishment and unjust and drastic Disendowment we have our doubts. The example of the Church of Ireland is not in point. There the doctrinal bias of the great majority as well of clergy as of laity, was uniform, and in that uniformity lay its strength. But the English Church, when disestab- lished, would certainly split into three fragments, the High Church fragment, the Low Church fragment, and the Broad Church fragment, which are only held together by the authority of the State. And we are by no means sure that the three fragments would find their enthusiasm enhanced by their sudden loss of status, and their abrupt transition to a condition of sectarian insig- nificance,—even though it were also a complete sectarian autonomy. Then as to the latter and more important consequence of Disestablishment, doctrinal independence, it is well that the English people should clearly realise to what the policy of the present Government is rapidly tending,—the policy of substituting competing sects for a national Church, the policy of restoring dogmatic and disciplinary autocracy to these broken pieces of a great ecclesiastical whole, the policy of divorcing the nation from any national religion, and furnishing it instead with a still greater choice of spiritual alterna- tives from amongst the confused welter of the sects. Neither the Free Church of Scotland nor the Disestab- lished Church of Ireland supply us with any analogy as to what the Church of England will become when Mr. Russell's hopes of Disestablishment are fulfilled. Both these Disestablished Churches were welded together by very deep theological convictions.
No one can say that of the Church of England. And when the people of England come to understand that it is the policy of the present Government to cut all the political and traditional bonds by which our greatest national institution is held together, we believe that we shall see the most startling reaction against the measure which Mr. Russell has announced and advocated, —indeed, the most sensational change of which the present generation has had any experience. Hitherto Disestablishment has had a far-off sound, and Dis- endowment has been interpreted in Mr. Gladstone's more generous and liberal sense. Now we are frankly assured that it is the Church of England that is attacked, and not merely the Church of Wales, and that Disendowment is to proceed on lines carefully planned to prevent any of the generous alleviations which Mr. Glad- stone accorded to the Church of Ireland. Nothing would surprise us more than to find that even in his own section of the Church, Mr. Russell has discovered any large sympathy with his views ; and we are perfectly sure that the prospect of a break-up of the nation itself, would not excite much more dismay than the prospect which Mr. Russell holds out to us of a Church in fragments struggling against the penury which the special scheme of the Government had deliberately promoted and secured.
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