OPEN TEACHING IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. * IN an age
of intellectual anarchy like our own, most reflective / men are agreed that a true mental unity can never be attained till free inquiry and free discussion are not only tolerated bat even welcomed. The one great guarantee of all advancement is the accorded right of unrestricted utterance ; always liable to the obvious moral qualifications. The men who, in a wise and affec- tionate spirit, recognize the doubts or indicate the difficulties which are so vaguely felt and so darkly feared, ought to be re- garded as benefactors, and not proscribed as enemies. If old and time-honoured convictions, when confronted with recently-dis- covered facts, are destined to undergo some modification, is it not better bravely to face the consequences than to live with that cowardly consciousness of something wrong, of something coming, which destroys all intellectual energy, and paralyzes all moral and social activity ? Free speech, indeed, is not truth, but it is, a condition of securing truth. "Open teaching" may be erro- neous teaching ; but, if it be disallowed, we shall never enjoy a teaching that is even proximately free from error. Moreover, " open teaching" is valuable not only for the fair contingencies which it predicts, but for the splendid example which it affords of sincerity, courage, and truthfulness in action.
Such a noble precedent is now furnished in the free discussion of religious topics, all of which require elucidation by some of the nation's authorized teachers,—men who bring to their com- mon enterprise rare intrepidity, unusual learning, and reflective powers of a very high order. Instructors such as these have at least a title to be heard ; they come before us duly appointed and certificated. We do not advise the feebler or undisciplined minds to read the volume, in which they have candidly stated the diffi- culties of the current theology ; but we counsel those who feel the pressure of religious doubt, and have reason to believe them- selves qualified for the investigation, not to omit its perusal ; we invite all official theological opponents to disprove their state- ments, or refute their theories ; we urge on all competent mem- bers of the sacred corporation to which they belong, the duty of a calm deliberate examination of their premises and conclusions.
The volume which has suggested these preliminary comments, bears the unpretending title of "Essays and Reviews ; ' the .joint contribution of seven authors, "each of whom is responsible for his respective article only " ; "these articles having been written in entire independence of each other, and without concert or com- parison." The avowed object of its publication is the promotion of the cause of religious and moral truth, by illustrating the ad- vantage which may accrue to it, "from a free handling, in a be- coming spirit, of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by the repeti- tion of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment." In this general concurrence we can predicate only a general sympathy ; we have no right to accredit absolutely each individual author with the "open teaching" of all his coadjutors; and we must be careful to give each the advantage of the distinc- tion which is sometimes indicated between hypothetical and cate- gorical propositions. Yet, with all these admissions' we are still of opinion that so decisive a work, in some essential aspects, has never yet emanated from the English sacerdotal body. An in- tense religious sentiment pervades its teaching ; a spirit of venera- tion for the Highest and Holiest Being ; for the Christian Faith, the Christian Church, the Christian Record ; yet with a complete rejection of all "traditional methods ; " an unmistakeable dis- avowal of all platform theologies ; and a candid acknowledgment of the apparent or certain results of the modern critical exegesis ; with a more or less decided recognition of the facts which obser- vation has made patent, or of the laws and methods which science has established.
But we proceed to report, while we shall forbear to appraise, these new developments of faith in some theologians of the Na- tional Church, our only visible bulwark against a disintegrating sectarianism which, in the event of its subversion, might prove highly oppressive to all philosophic thought, within or without its protecting pale.
The first of the seven essays now under consideration is en- titled "The Education of the World," and is the contribution of Dr. Temple, chaplain in ordinary to the Queen and Head Hagar • Essays and Reviews. Published by John W. Parker and Son.
of Rugby School. The author, after indicating an important difference between the material and spiritual worlds, goes on to remark that man is only man by virtue of his being a member of Vie human race ; that each successive age incorporates itself into the preceding ; and that the power, which thus helps the present to gather into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment ; all successive generations being days in his tzistence ; all discoveries, inventions, creeds, opinions, and social states, being his works, his thoughts, and his manners. There is then, he continues a childhood, a youth, and a manhood of the ivorld ; it is educated collectively, as we are educated indi- vidually: The individual has first rules, then examples, then principles, to guide him. Such, too, has been the guidance of the race. The world has gone to school and has been broken up in classes. The Jewish nation was selected as the depository of religions truth. It was educated first by the Mosaic law ; then by Prophetic inspiration ; then by the great lesson of the cap- tivity, which issued in a settled national belief in the mono- theistic idea and the principle of purity. The field prepared for the dissemination of Christianity presented the fourfold division of Rome, Greece Asia, and Judtea. "The Hebrews may be said to have disciplined the human conscience, Rome the human will, Greece the reason and taste, Asia the spiritual imagination." Barbarism in Europe superinduced the revival of Judaism, the Papacy of the Middle ages, and the Papal hierarchy. When their work was accomplished, the Reformation came with its lesson of toleration. In learning this new lesson, Christendom has found her standpoint in the Bible ; the study of which, says Dr. Tem- ple, is the immediate work of the day. That study, he admits, may lead to such results as the rejection of the literal sense of the first chapters of Genesis, the conviction of "occasional inaccu- racy" in the narrative of the inspired writers ; and even of "in- terpolations and forgeries." But those results, he tells us, should be welcome ; for the substance of biblical teaching will not really be affected by them.
The second essay, contributed by Dr. Rowland Williams, Vice- Principal of St. David's College, Lampeter, and Vicar of Broad Chalke, Wilts, has for its subject the Biblical researches of Bun- sen, a "man who in our darkest perplexity has reared again the banner of truth and uttered thoughts which give courage to the weak and sight to the blind ; " a man too with whom Dr. Wil- liams generally finds reason to agree where he has been best able to follow him. The result of Bunsen's historic inquiry. on Egypt, "if we can receive it, is to vindicate for the civilized kingdom of Egypt, from Menes downward, an antiquity of nearly four thousand years before Christ." A vast extension of time, beyond the limits of biblical chronology, is required by considerations relative to the development of commerce and government, and still more of lan- guages and physical features of race. The traditions of Babylon, Sidon, Assyria, and Iran, as applied by Bunsen, illustrate and con- firm, while they modify our interpretation of Genesis. The notices of the beginnings of our race, contained in this book, are ap- parently regarded by Dr. Williams himself, as half ideal, half traditional, and we understand him to adopt with Bunsen the alternative of the gradual growth of the Pentateuch,—" Mosaic only as indicating the mind and embodying the developed system of Moses." "That there was a Bible, says the author of this essay, "before our Bible, and that some of our present books, as certainly Genesis and Joshua and perhaps Job, Jonah, and Daniel, are expanded from simpler elements, is vindicated in the book be- fore us, (Bunsen's Dime Government in History,) rather than proved as it might be." Passing from the narrative to the pro- phetic portions of scripture, Dr. Williams reminds us that even Butler foresaw the possibility that every prophecy in the Old Testament might have its elucidation in contemporaneous history; that Bishop Kidder Middleton, Archbishop.Newcome and others, conceded or established an historical sense in the Ohl Testament texts remote from adaptations in the New; that Coleridge en- tirely discarded secular prognostication from the idea of prophecy, and. that Arnold and his truest followers bear, though not always consistently, on the same side. Baron Bunsen, he continues, suc- ceeding to this inheritance of opinion, dares not say that David foretold the exile because it is mentioned in the Psalms ; or quote Nahum denouncing ruin against Nineveh, or Jeremiah against Tyre, without remembering that already the Babylonian power threw its shadow across Asia, and Nebuchadnezzar was mustering his armies ; or deny that the book of Isaiah is composed of ele- ments of different tern ; or pretend that the Maiden's child (Is. vii. 16,) was not to be born in the reign of Ahaz as a sign against the Kings Pekah and Resin; or doubt that the hebdomadal period of Daniel ended in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, or that those portions of the book supposed to be specially predictive, are a history of past occurrences up to that reign ; or lastly, resist the conclusion that the Man of Sorrow (Is. liii.) was the collective Israel or prophetic remnant, with some reference to the suffering Jeremiah, whose figure tinged the delineation of the true Israel, "Just as the figure of Laud or Hammond might represent the Caroline Church in the eyes of her poet." Nevertheless, this his- torical representation has its highest fulfilment in Him, who said, "Father not my will but thine be done !"
Proceeding with a somewhat sudden transition to the con- cluding essay, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," we find that while Professor Jowett contends that the Bible is to be subjected to the same hermeneutical processes as other books, he regards it as "the witness of God in the world anticipating in a rude and primitive age the truth that was to be." Interpretation, he maintains, is the province of the few. The diffusion of a critical spirit in history and literature is, he affirms, seriously affecting the criticism of the Bible : so that " educated persons are begin- ning to ask, not what scripture may be made to mean, but what it does." Inspiration, as Dr. Jowett understands it, is not incon- sistent with variations of fact or inaccuracies of language, or with the theory that the three first gospels were based on an orally preserved tradition. In some of the prevailing modes of inter- pretation, a change is not, he observes, so much a matter of expe- diency, as of necessity. For instance, the time will come when educated men "will no more think that the first chapters of Genesis relate the same tale which geology and ethnology unfold, than they now think the meaning of Joshua (x. 12, 13), to be in accordance with Galileo's discovery." The "Mosaic Cosmogony" is the subject of an essay, by Mr. C. W. Goodwin, which, commencing with an allusion to the fa- mous Italian heretic and the Copernican revolution in astronomy, declares that " geologists of all religious creeds are agreed that the earth has existed for an immense series of years to be counted by millions rather than by thousands," whereas, the Mosaic narra- tive instructs us that the world was made in six days, and is "plainly adverse to the present astronomical and geological views of the universe." In the schemes of conciliation proposed, "the plain meaning of the Hebrew record is," says the essayist, "unscrupu- lously tampered with, and in general the pith of the whole process lies in divesting the text of all meaning whatever." The conci- liators, moreover, are not agreed among themselves. Mr. Hugh Miller maintains that the theories of Chalmers and Buokland are untenable; while Archdeacon Pratt rejects the principle of inter- pretation advocated by Mr. Hugh Miller, the Reverend Dr. Mac- donald, and Dr. Lardner, quoting from a work by the late M. D'Orbigny, who has demonstrated "that there have been at least twenty-nine distinct periods of animal and vegetable existence." Mr. Goodwin's final conclusion is that the Mosaic account of crea- tion is not an authentic utterance of Divine knowledge, but a human utterance, which it has pleased Providence to use in a special way for the education of mankind. It teaches "the unity of the design of the world, and its subordination to one sole Maker and Lawgiver."
We draw special attention to Professor Powell's remark- able essay, "On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity." We do not pretend entirely to understand its drift ; but if we mistake not, its tendency is to eliminate the evidential argument from pro-christian logic ; the true acceptance of revelation being "most worthily and satisfactorily based" on the apostolic as- surance of faith. Testimony, on the other hand, is described as but a second-hand assurance ; a blind guide that can avail nothing against reason. The order of nature is proclaimed to be the dominant scientific idea which the inductive philosophy has evolved. Nature's boundaries, indeed, vary with our knowledge, but as our knowledge is enlarged, apparently isolated, and mar- vellous cases have settled down into examples of broad and. general laws, thus confirming " the real and paramount dominion
of the rule of law and order, of universal subordination of phy- sical causes, as the sole principle and criterion of proof and evi- dence in the region of physical and sensible truth. '
And here we must not omit to record the Savilian Professor's conviction that creation is only another name for our ignorance of the mode of production ; his acceptance of the alternative propo- sition that either development or spontaneous generation must be true ; and his testimony to "Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on the Origin of Species by the law of "natural selection "—which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists—the origination of new species by natural causes : a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature." The "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England," by the Reverend Mark Pattison, the sixth essay in this volume, is a philosophical discussion of the very highest order. Unfortunately, we have only space to indicate some of the positions of its able author. Mr. Pattison, maintaining that there is a law of con- tinuity in the progress of the story, instructs us that we cannot consistently "neglect those immediate agencies in the production of the present which had their origin towards the beginning of the eighteenth century." These agencies are, 1. Toleration, 2. Religious Reform, under the double action of Methodism and Evangelicalism, and 3. The growth of the supremacy of Reason or Rationalism ; which is defined as "a habit of thought ruling all minds, under the conditions of which all alike tried to make good the peculiar opinions they might cherish." In his esti- mate of the Deistical controversy, Mr. Pattison thinks that per- haps on the whole, the defence is at least as good as the attack, but that "it is a reduetio ad absurdum of common sense philoso- phy, home-baked theology, when we find that the result is that it is safer to believe in a God, lest if there should happen to be one, he might send us to hell for denying his existence." The evi- dential school, he thinks succeeded "in vindicating the ethical part of christianity, and the regulative aspect of revealed truth, and failed in establishing the supernatural and speculative part," thus "enriching the history of doctrine with a complete refuta- tion of that method as an instrument of theological investigation." According to Mr. Pattison "neither the external nor the internal evidences are properly Theology at all. Theology, he defines as, first, the speculative habit by means of which the mind. places it- self already in another world than this, and secondly, "as ethical and regulative of our conduct as men, in those relations which are temporal and transitory."
Similarly, Mr. Wilson remarks in his essay on "The National Church," that Christ's religion is not revealed as a theology of the intellect, nor as an historical faith : but that "the true Christian life is the consciousness of bearing a part in a great moral order of which the highest agency upon earth has been committed to the Church." Accordingly, he favours, if we rightly catch his meaning, a rational "'application of ideology to the interpretation of Scripture, to the doctrines of Christianity, and to the formularies of the Church " ; and pointing out that nearly one-half of our population, more or less alienated from the English communion, do not supply candidates for its ministry, he requires the removal of all artificial diseouragements. . He would emancipate what Coleridge called the " Nationality " of the Church, so as to allow a free distribution of property, by means of the national endowment to every family in the country, in re- quital for certain services ; and effect a distribution in like man- ner of the best kind of education. Arguing that the present ap- parent stringency of subscription, as required of the clergy of the Church of England, is not coeval with its reconstruction at the period of the Reformation, he recommends an enactment prohibit- ing the bishops from requiring the subscriptions under the third article of the thirty-sixth canon, together with the repeal of the 13th Elizabeth, except as to its second section. Such an enactment would, he thinks, at once "relieve many scruples, and make the
Church more national, without disturbing its ultimate law." / We have thus endeavoured to present the germinal thoughts of this eminently brave and out-spoken volume. Aiming to notify all new or important characteristics of the times, we have not ab- stained from reporting these seemingly novel "phases of faith," carefully limiting ourselves to statement, and avoiding all con- clusive expression of opinion. It must, however, be evident to all thoughtful minds that, as the old Orthodox 4anqiiillity was invaded by a rush of Evangelicalism, and as the Evangelical ef- fervescence subsided before Tractarian speculation, so now the common repose is menaced by the formidable advances of a free theology. It would be useless to ignore the movement; pusil- lanimous idly to lament it ; and tyrannous to attempt its suppres- sion. We indeed, cannot but honour the men who have so courageously set the example of "Open teaching" in the Church of England. In any event, we may all await the result with con- fidence; since, to quote the words of one of their number, "even the mistakes of careful and reverend students are more valuable now than truth held in unthinking acquiescence."
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