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of the Liberation Society, hardly an expression of opinion from any of its leading members, which does not appeal for support to the most sacerdotal and the most exclusive of all the tendencies which the Church of England contains. Almost the only life which they consent to acknowledge in the English Church, they attribute, not to the Evangelical, not to the Liberal, not to the steadfast, dutiful, and unostentatious elements which form the bulk of the National Church, but to the noisy and turbulent, though, doubtless, after their manner, zealous and self-denying, partisans of the Oxford school. Not Arnold, not Whately, not Milman, not Frederick Robertson, not Frederick Maurice, not Cecil, nor Venn, nor Simeon, but John Henry Newman, the chief of that retrograde and exclusive movement, though filled, as he himself describes, 'with fierce thoughts' against the liberal tendencies of the age, is hailed by them as the English Churchman to whom they look with the greatest admiration. They are, of course, not insensible to the claims of genius, learning, and zeal which he shares with the other leaders of religious thought who have just been enumerated; but the distinction which specially commends him to their notice is, obviously, his antipathy to Erastianism and his separation from the Establishment.

Such is the attitude which the two factions within and without the Church assume towards their common parent. That the alliance thus cemented would be rent into pieces if their temporary object could be accomplished, is too evident to need argument. No one would assume a more haughty and hostile attitude towards the Presbyterians and Independents than those to whom

Hopes of a better prospect.

Use of

Noncon

formity.

the Divine and exclusive claim of Episcopal Sacraments is as dear as their hostility to the control of law and to the value of patriotism. The great historical and national edifices of the Church of England, if turned into merely private conventicles, and if occupied, as they might well be, by the zealots who even now shrink from the slightest contact in religious ministrations with their Nonconforming brethren, would become hermetically sealed against those who now claim, and justly claim, a part in those glorious inheritances.

But the object of these sermons is to bring out what are the elements which, not in the polemical portions of religious society, but in the more quiet, pacific, and reasonable spheres, furnish a substantial ground for the hope of better things.

It has been that with regard to the Non-juring element in the Church of England the true policy of the Church is not, and ought not to be, suppression, but toleration combined with full liberty for development of the more Protestant and liberal tendencies within its pale. In like manner, the true policy with regard to the Nonconforming elements outside the pale is not either repression, which indeed belongs altogether to the past, nor even absorption into the Church itself, but a full recognition of the value, the excellence, in some instances the almost indispensable necessity, of such forms of ecclesiastical government, of religious doctrine, of practical organisation, as the Nonconformist communities supply. It is not a question of equality. The Nonconformist is, usually, as proud of his Nonconformity as a Churchman can be of his Churchmanship. A voluntary Church and

an Established Church each have their own peculiar merits and defects, as the policy of a select company or a selfchosen association differs from the policy of a State or of an Empire. A great Nonconformist of the last generation, Robert Hall, has described in an eloquent passage the mutual services which the conflicting factors of Christian life in England render to each other, and has pointed his warning by the example of the stagnation and decay into which the Gallican Church fell after it had succeeded in expelling from France every vestige of Huguenot descent. Just in the same way as we complain of the blind zeal which stimulates some leading Nonconformists, which would wish to sweep away every witness to a larger, more national Christianity than is possible in a congeries of small narrow sects, so it would be lamentable if any attempt were made on the part of the Church of England to obliterate those standing testimonies which the different branches of Nonconformity have borne to truths that from time to time have faded away, or have never been developed, in the Church itself.

How essentially English are these different forms is sufficiently proved by the fact that they have spread hardly at all to any nations outside the Anglo-Saxon race. The Church of England is sometimes reproached with the fact that it is an insular institution; and Nonconformists themselves have sometimes echoed a reproach which, as a practical proof of its suitability to the English temperament, is, in fact, one of its greatest praises. But it is equally true that Independency exists nowhere except in England and the United States;

Latitudinarian

theology.

that the Baptists, though they began in Germany, have struck root only in England and its dependencies; that the Wesleyans, although their religious life produced, no doubt, a revival in the Protestant Churches of France and Geneva, are, as an ecclesiastical body, confined entirely to the same local atmosphere; that Quakers and even Unitarians, as separate sects, exist nowhere in the Continent, and only in a limited degree even in Scotland. It is the national character of English Nonconformity which ought to make the Church feel that its dissenting children are truly its own members; that in this respect the theory of Hooker is true in a deeper and more permanent sense than that in which he intended it; that these great religious divergences are the outgrowth of peculiarly English characteristics, and form part of the bone and sinew of the country.

And if the course of history illustrate the English tendencies common to all these different sects, it may no less clearly prove their common Christianity. The piety of Baxter and Calamy, the philanthropy of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, the spiritual refinement of Firmin and of John James Tayler, the apostolic energy of Wesley and his followers, the missionary zeal of Carey, Marshman, Ellis, and Williams, are sufficient indications of this to all who have eyes to see or ears to hear the signs of Christian life beyond the borders of their own immediate experience.

This is the point where it may fairly be asked to what quarter of the past or future history of the English Church we are to look for such a spirit as will admit and conciliate these common elements of national and

religious vitality-for the method by which they might still be utilised for the benefit of the whole nation, without giving each of them, or any of them, that exclusive predominance which at least some of their members are now anxious to secure. And here surely it is not so much in the framework of the English Church as in the inward temper and attitude of thought which it contains or may contain, that the remedy is to be looked for. The remedy is to be looked for in that school of theology which in a recent 'Chart of Religious Thought' is noted as too insignificant to be spoken of, but which is in fact the marrow of the Church of England.

It has been too much the custom to regard the Church of England as chiefly represented, partly by its Prayerbook and its Articles, partly by the forward polemics who, in different periods, have occupied the chief ranks of its ecclesiastical phalanx. But what Principal Tulloch has well brought out is the fact that behind these has been, almost from the first, a large, diffusive, expansive, progressive school of Christian thought which refuses to be numbered with any of the contending factions that have raged within or without the Church; which refuses to be ranked as a party itself, or to call any man 'Master;' but which, nevertheless, has formed the backbone of the National Church through all its varying vicissitudes, the life-blood which has nourished it, and kept it alive, when it was well-nigh perishing of the fever or the consumption brought on by the activities or the failings of its other constituent elements. It began even before the

See the excellent delineation of these men in Oxford Reformers of the Sixteenth Century, by Frederick Seebohm.

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