ROMANLSM AND RATIONALISM.*
Mn. KIRICIIS discusses a variety of subjects in the volume before us. He has furnished us with essays on "Satire," "Convict Management," and "Mr. John Stuart Mill." Then there are, besides, papers on "Elizabeth and her England," "Model Ser- mons," "Ritualism," "The Logical Identity of Romanism, Anglicanism, and Evangelicalism," "Mr. Lecky's History of Rationalism," and "the New Reformation." Of the first three essays we do not mean to speak in this article ; there is no one feature in them special enough or sufficiently salient to demand a separate consideration. Only with reference to one of them we would venture to ask whether Mr. Kirkus has made himself thoroughly acquainted with the working and very remarkable re- sults of the "Irish Convict System," for we can hardly suppose that if he had done so he would bracket together the names of Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir Walter Crofton, as if, after all, there were little to choose between the methods of prison discipline respectively pursued in England and in Ireland. As we need scarcely write for readers of this journal, folly and failure have characterized the former, wisdom and success belong to the latter.
Omitting these three discussions, the remaining articles, now published in this separate form by Mr. Kirkus, though labelled "miscellaneous," are in reality of a peculiarly homogeneous character. We all naturally are inclined to advance in the line of least resistance, and we fancy that to a gentleman who has a " reverend " handle to his name, it is easier and more natural to write on technically religious or ecclesiastical subjects, than on those of a purely secular character. Accordingly, the six essays under review all reveal strongly the elective affinities of a pro- fessed theologian. We do not at all mean to affirm that Mr. Kirkus does not write on all the questions he has chosen to handle with intelligence and robust ability. On the contrary, though sometimes dashed with a coarseness which reminds us of some of the ultra-muscular pronouncements of Theodore Parker, there is always the felt presence of intellectual force in the pages of our author, and in the essay on Mr. Mill we discover the proofs of a very respectable metaphysical talent. At the same time, as we said, Mr. Kirkus naturally gravitates towards the ecclesiastico-theological sphere ; and in this region, if not a producer or creator of fresh thought and novel sugges- tion, he is a decidedly able distributor of several of the more advanced teachings of the day. In thus writing we intend no disparagement to our author. It is always the few who are chosen to inaugurate a new era, the few in whose hearts the primary battle is fought between letter and spirit, between tradition and the deeper revealings of God. Bat among the many who are called to mould and develop the fortunes of the struggle there are diversi- ties of gifts, and in this second category Mr. Kirkus is entitled to an honourable place. He has, to begin with, the merit of being able to state in a clear and logical way the crucial dilemma which, with more or less of distinct consciousness in the hearts of men, is now ranging the members of the Church and of churches alike into two opposing camps. Mr. Capes some thirty years ago anticipated, if our memory is not treacherous, this statement of Mr. Kirkus, though possibly the latter never met with the striking book on Roinanism and private judgment. It may indeed be alleged that the world had not to wait for either of the two writers to give it
* Misceilascous Buoys. ByfieT. WilliamIcirkno, LL.B. London: Longman& definitions or new counsels on this subject ; for, after all, what does either of them tell us which is not in substance identical with the essential conditions of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, or of that between Protestantism and Popery ? Possibly not, and possibly nothing, our author might reply, and yet might opportunely add, are the essential conditions of the antagonism between Rome and Protestantism really recognized or believed in by so many, that a fresh representation of what a former race of controversialistewould have called the status quzestionis is wholly superfluous ? We cannot think so. On the contrary, we are convinced that there are multitudes among us who would be startled if brought face to face with an explicit exhibition of the reasons which have conspired to produce their respective acceptances or denials. To shield his old, evangelic piety from the darts of rationalism, Dr. Newman cut his way into the citadel of authority with the sword of private judgment, and Dr. Pusey and Dr. M'Neile comfort themselves in this day of blasphemy and rebuke by taking refuge together in the traditional stronghold of "everlast- ing damnation" and "plenary inspiration." To follow Dr. Newman one must be guilty of the mortal sin of exercising one's private judg- ment, because, if one takes a leap even in the dark, it must be because onejudges it best to do so. To:remain behind with the Ritualists and Evangelicals is only to subordinate the traditions of Rome to those of the Tudors and Geneva. Looking at these phenomena of the theological world, we see the rapiers marvellously change hands. At the same time, we must hold with Mr. Kirkus when he main- tains that Romanism, Anglicanism, and Evangelicalism are logi- cally identical. Common to the three is the conviction that a rigid dogmatic orthodoxy has been authoritatively given to the world by Heaven,—only Dr. Newman would say, with more of "rationalism," that a "developing authority" has been set up among us. They all alike insist that on the part of the laity certain dogmas of the past shall be regarded as infallible axioms or postulates. Up to these you may laudably inquire, but to transgress these limits is to lay sacrilegious hands on the "faith once delivered to the saints,"—as if "the faith" were not fidelity to Christ, which only noble souls in their lives strive to maintain, but a sort of enshrined Koh-i-Noor which any company of parish beadles could quite efficiently guard from harm or theft. This amazing, but widespread, conception of the subject-matter of Revelation as a stereotyped set of formal propositions, involves. the denial of both individual faith and social progress. It ignores and would crush out the manifold play and interfusion of thought and feeling, of reverent doubt and joyous surrender, the humility of conscious intellectual fallibility, and the trust in the divineness of the heart's deepest affirmations, as ethical inspirations from the spirit of perfect charity ; nor less, the educative significance and value of the successive events of the individual life, with their varying suggestions and associations, their lights and shadows, and receding horizons, which must surely all be efficient elements in the formation of an enlightened faith. It is a conception, more- over, which tends to sunder the relation between moral perception and purity of heart, and would justify us well nigh in supposing. that belief in the Trinity and belief in the rule of three were quite of a kindred character. Socially considered, this hard-and-fast notion of a " deposit " of crystallized dogmas, entrusted exclusively to a sacerdotal custody, or to the Church at large, but the guar- dianship of which demands no special gift, on the part of the watchmen, of either intellectual capacity or high spiritual cha- racter, necessarily repudiates all development or progress. It puts the golden age of the Church in the past, and not in the future, to which the Apostles and Christ himself directed the heart and hope of humanity, and it is associated with the strange hypothesis that the grand aim of Christiauity was by means of certain defiuite prescriptions to save meu from some terrible arrangements in the next world, instead of its seeking, as we believe its first purpose to be, to secure a divine society, or Kingdom of Heaven, here.
In his essay on the "New Reformation" Mr. Kirkus writes vigorously and clearly on these and kindred topics; and in most that he says on such important subjects as the following,—the atone- ment; on the bibliolatry which regards the Bible as a statute book, instead of a history, written by men who were variously moved by the Divine Spirit ; on the pe rilous extravagances of the sacramentarians, and, finally, on the hope which that which is likest God within the soul commands us to entertain of an ultimate submission of all hearts to the inexorable love of God,—we cordially agree with him, and beg to thank hint for his essays, in which he states his conclusions so forcibly. Mr. Kirkus would coin- pel his readers to meet this interrogation, and answer it manfully : Is a dogma true because others have asserted it ? or is it to be
believed, and only believed, because all noblest considerations, those drawn from art, from nature, from the schools, from the Bible, from conscience, from human experience, from all that the Son of God, who is "Light of light," must have said and done, command us to say this truth is from God, and if inwoven into our daily and all-day life, would make us Godlike ?
But whilst sympathizing so largely with Mr. Kirkus, we must protest against the language in which he repeatedly indulges when he speaks of the Church of England. We condemn as emphati- cally as our author does the blended servility and truculent intolerance of several of the Elizabethan prelates. We can with difficulty imagine that any Englishman in this nineteenth century would in any lawful assembly stand up and defend the policy of Archbishop Parker, of whom Fuller quaintly says that he was "a Parker, indeed, careful to keep the fences, and shut the gates of discipline against all such night stealers as would invade the same." But Parker's immediate successor was Grinds]. who, as every schoolboy knows, so far from lending himself as a submis- sive tool to the orders of the Queen, fearlessly remonstrated with Her Majesty when she issued her command for the suppression of 4' prophesying,s," and told her bluntly that "to deal thus peremp- torily in matters of faith and religion was the anti-christian voice -of the Pope's 'Sic volo, sic jubeo stet pro ratione voluntas.' " Elizabeth—need we write ?—visited the plainspoken Primate with some very palpable tokens of her hot displeasure ; but there were some things that Grindal dreaded considerably more than the wrath of the Queen. He never retracted his opinion, and she never forgave him. Again, there was a certain parish priest in the days of Elizabeth who won from his contemporaries the honoured appellations of "the Father of the Poor" and "the Apostle of the North." This was Bernard Gilpin, a man of -wholly heroic mould. His feats of calm courage and dauntless -daring are too familiar to be repeated here, and yet Mr. Kirkus writes, "The Establishment could contain only the feeble or the -dishonest." Again, "The clergy of the Establishment persecuted for themselves with the contemptible spitefulness of slinking -cowards ;" and finally, "the Anglican Establishment had not a single claim upon the acceptance of the nation." We are not ,going to hurl back coarse words at Mr. Kirkus, but we must own that these statements of his filled us with amazement. For if the Establishment had no claim on the acceptance of the nation, how bas it come to pass that for three centuries the majority of the station has accepted it, and that even now, thousands who, like -ourselves, look upon the Irish Church as a mockery, a scandal, and measureless injustice, entertain towards the Church of England the loyal regard which is never elicited except by an institution which at once represents and secures the interests of truth, of :liberty, of order, and of progress? Surely the Establishment, which enlisted among its defenders such men as Jewell, and above all, Richard Hooker, could contain others than "only the feeble -or dishonest ;" and any one who remembers the magnificent perora- tion of the fourth book of the Ecclesiastical Polity (if we do not -owe an apology to our readers for thus speaking) will hardly be trought to believe that the claims of the "Reformed religion—a thing at the Queen's coming to the crown raised as it were by miracle from the dead," to use Hooker's words,—could commend themselves only to knaves or idiots.
Indeed, the blot in these essays is the author's misunderstanding -of the place and function of the National Church. It has not yet -occurred to him that the Establishment is not a compromise, but a -comprehension, and though in one passage he evidently puts a strain on himself to acknowledge how helpful to the cause of free inquiry -certain English clergymen have been, just because, being members of the Anglican Communion their testimony might a priori be pre- sumed to be given on the side of orthodoxy, still his antecedents as -a Nonconformist affect his judgments of the Church continually. If Mr. Kirkus will study again the history of the English Church until it culminates in the issuing of the Magna Chaste of her liberties,—the decision of the Privy Council in the case of the Essays and Reviews—we cannot but believe that in candour be will admit that instead of "the Church being the slave of the civil power," the clergy of the English Establishment are in pos- session of a freedom to inquire and proclaim their convictions which, excepting the Church of Holland, is not enjoyed by the ministers of any other Church, much less of any sect, as perhaps Mr. Kirkus may happen to know from experience, in -Christendom.
If our author will but reconsider the relations of the Church -of England to the past, to the present, and to the future, how she combines conservatism and progress, revering the wisdom of other days, but free to assimilate the larger thought and life of our
century; if he will but reflect that on three of the most momentous theological questions, inspiration, justification, and the continu- ance hereafter of the divine restorative discipline, the Church has renounced the dogmatic attitude, and left her clergy in full liberty to prophesy respecting them in such manner as to each of them shall seem best fitted to aid in the growth of goodness in his congregation, we venture to say for him that he will discover that the "stagnant pool" beside the stream of progress is not, as he has affirmed, the National Establishment, but rather that outside sectarianism which, regarding the State as a profane institution, sunders its own theological convictions from the general interests of the country, and so ceases to participate in the onward advance of our country's civilization. The sect is hopelessly committed to its little "ism." It is built on the logic of yesterday. It is im- prisoned in an unprogressive rationalism ; but the Church, the organ of the whole national life, at once represents the past, and is free to follow whithersoever the Divine Spirit shall lead her, bound by no dogma, but trusting in the aspirations of faith, and hope, and charity.
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