AGGRESSIVE TJNSECTARIANISM. T HE Conference of the League of the Evangelical
Free Churches held on Tuesday at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, under the presidency of the Rev. J. Guinness Rogers, determined on assuming a more " aggressive " attitude towards the Churches which desire a more strictly denominational religious education for their children. And it turned out that the substantive basis of this more aggressive attitude was to be their determination to have " unsectaiian " teaching. Now, aggressive unsectarianism appears to us a very quaint form of modern prejudice. It is rather like aggressive charity or intolerant sympathy. The root-idea of un- sectarianism is to ignore theological distinctions, which those who ignore them of course deem to be secondary in importance to those on which they insist. But the root of the aggressiveness is the assumption that those who will not ignore such distinctions are culpable for not ignoring them, and deserve no consideration at the hands of the State for their crotchet. And this is exactly what the Conference appears to have held. For they denounced the admission of " priests " for any purpose into public elementary schools with a certain passion, and passed over the injustice which they are in danger of in- flicting at the other end of the theological scale,—the Uni- tarian and agnostic end,—with a calm indifference which was not very creditable to their comprehensiveness. They may, we suppose, treat the small group of agnostic parents as too trivial to take any account of, though we wish we could feel quite confident that it both is, and is likely to remain, so very small. But the Unitarians, at least, are not quite a negligeable quantity. And it is a matter of supreme importance in teaching children, to determine what sort of reverence and spiritual humility of mind is to be fostered towards the figure of Christ. If this is to be what those who believe in the Incarnation desire, then a great wrong is inflicted on Unitarians, who every year are more and more eager to deprecate what they regard as the pallid exaggeration disfiguring the worship of a limited human being. But if there is to be no such reverence and humility of feeling before our Lord, then all those Christian sects who heartily accept the Incarnation, must agree to drop out of their lessons, in consideration for one small group of believers, by fur the most important of the elements on which children's minds should be fed. Hence the " aggressive " unsectarians of the Evangelical Free Churches must either mutilate their religious teaching by omitting the one great conception which best takes hold of children's minds, or must ignore completely the deepest convictions of two well-marked and deeply convinced religious thinkers, at opposite ends of the theological scale,—those who insist on the belief in a formal priesthood as of the very essence of the channel of sacramental grace, and those again who re- ject the Incarnation as the very root of all theological error. The Evangelical Churches do not appear to conceal, or wish to conceal, their deliberate intention to exclude the former class from their sympathies. They almost regard a priest .ts an ordinary citizen regards a mad dog, and think that the lees toleration is shown to him, by the State at all events,—we do not say that they would persecute him as a private person,—the better. But what we want to know is the principle on which they are prepared to justify their indifference to the scruples of parents,—say either Roman Catholic or High Anglican parents,—who would regard their children as deprived of the very deepest elements of religious teaching, if they were not taught to look to the sacraments of the Church as the most important channels of divine grace, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how they would justify their indifference to the scruples of parents who would treat the disposition to look upon Jesus Christ as the Divine Being in a human form as a piece of gross and fatal superstition endanger.. ing the whole freedom and progress of the human intellect for all time to come. Both these classes of parents really exist, and so far as we can judge, are as much entitled to sympathetic treatment as any other sect which the Evangelical Free Churches are prepared to embrace in their rather arbitrarily limited religious charity. What we understand them either to say or to imply,—to say in the case of the believers in priesthood, and to imply, though they avoid saying it, in the case of ljnitarians,—is that they cannot go so far as to consider either the one or the other class in providing for the eccentricities of the parental conscience ; and that if the parents of either creed are not satisfied with unsectarian religious teaching, they must avail themselves of the con- science-clause, and keep their children away from the religious lessons altogether, for the religious lesson must not be poisoned by sacramental doctrines, adapted to any one's scruples, and it must not be mutilated till it loses all its moral influence for the young, for any one's scruples either. In other words, " aggressive " unsectarianism must not crane at a little indifference to exceptional consciences here and there. It can only provide for the majority. As for Roman Catholics and High Anglicans, and strict Unitarians, —though on the latter sect we must speak with less con- fidence, as the Evangelical Free Churches ignore them completely in their discussions as reported,—they must be left to their home lessons and their lessons in church.
We cannot understand the rationale of this strange intolerance of denominationalism ; iu other words, in- tolerance of all who attach as much importance to doc- trines which the unsectarians boycott as to doctrines which they respect and impress. We could understand them if they insisted on excluding religion entirely from the lessons of the State, and confined the State teaching to purely secular subjects,—though, by the way, that is uncommonly hard to do unless all English literature is to be boycotted where either God or Christ are referred to,—but to let the religious lesson be given freely so long as no sacramental principles are taught and no attempt is made to brand the worship of Christ as idolatry, is a policy so entirely arbitrary that it seems to us wholly indefensible. It seems to be an attempt to define in the most capricious way those religious opinions which deserve respect, and those which deserve only the barest toleration. So long as all priesthood is recognised as danger- ous and suspicious, and all who cut down revelation to the limits of natural religion are made to feel that they have no place in the national religion, the Evangelical Free Churches will open wide their arms to the rest,—nay, will not even allow their minor differences to be so much as breathed in an elementary school. But why these eccen- tric limitations? Apparently the Evangelical Free Churches desire to make of their brand-new unsectarianism a new kind of idol. All who will bow down to it shall be cherished, and all who decline to worship the graven image shall be made to feel their inferiority. That means, we take it, that they have much charity for all who agree with them in the main, and little for those who differ from them in the main. But that is an attitude of mind too frankly egotistic to claim to be made the ground of any just legislation. Modern persecution is reduced happily to very meagre dimensions, but within these meagre dimensions aggressive unsectarianism proposes to perse- cute all who do not agree with it, so far at least as declining entirely to make any room for them, can be called persecution.
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