Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 

 
 NATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 OR 
 
 OESARISM AND CLERICALISM
 
 PRINTED BY W. SPEAIGHT AND SONS, 
 FETTER LANE, LONDON.
 
 NATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 C^SARISM AND CLERICALISM 
 
 REV. J. B. HEARD, M.A. 
 
 Of Cains College, Cambridge, and late Vicar of Bilton, Harrogate. 
 Author of" The Tripartite Natura," &*c., &*c., &c. 
 
 LONDON 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 1877
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 As this Work has not been written in support 
 of any special Sectarian views, nor with any 
 animus against what is good in the Church of 
 England, it is hoped it will be read without 
 prejudice by the supporters of pure religion in 
 the Established as well as the Free Churches. 
 
 1G77C2
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IN dealing with the question of National Churches, one 
 is struck with the difficulty of approaching such a 
 subject with a perfectly unprejudiced mind. If ever 
 there was need of attending to Dr. Johnson's advice, 
 and " clearing the mind of cant," it is on a topic like 
 this. The Christian world is divided into two camps 
 on this subject. There are those who are opposed to 
 any relation of the Church to the State, and who see in 
 this connection only another form of " worldliness." 
 Again, there are those who desire to maintain this 
 connection, and who, while admitting the worldliness 
 resulting from it, refer it to other causes, or to certain 
 local peculiarities not inseparable from the institution 
 itself. As long as men reason in this way, setting out 
 with certain prepossessions for or against the connec- 
 tion of Church and State, and drawing conclusions 
 perfectly logical from these arbitrary prepossessions, it 
 is impossible to advance the cause of truth and charity. 
 Logic, in fact, is a lever so irresistible, that it only 
 wants a fulcrum of self-interest with which to move the 
 world. This explains why it is that dogmatic state- 
 ments on either side have such little weight. Either we 
 admit the premises, and the conclusion then becomes
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 the veriest truism ; or we deny them, and then there is 
 no common ground on which to join issue. 
 
 Discarding, then, the dogmatic method, which leaves 
 us exactly where it finds us, we propose to look at the 
 question in the light of history and experience. The 
 growth of National Churches took its rise from the 
 desire felt from the first to develop Christianity into a 
 dogmatic and organised system of religion such as the 
 world could understand, and which the governing classes 
 could make use of as an instrument for holding society 
 together. As the new religion began to spread at the 
 time when the Roman Empire was falling to pieces, it 
 opportunely offered itself for such a purpose. But it 
 could not have been made use of as an instrument of 
 government unless it had first developed into a sacer- 
 dotal system. The history of that first corruption is 
 instructive. It had not long taken root in Imperial 
 Rome before it renounced the primitive type of the 
 Church. Instead of the autonomy of the Churches, 
 those little religious republics federated more or less 
 loosely together like the Greek Commonwealths ; it 
 adopted the Roman and imperial idea of unity under 
 a form of diocesan monarchy. It was at this stage of 
 its development that Christianity offered itself to a 
 crafty usurper, Constantine, as an instrument for 
 cementing his ill-gotten political power; and, by de- 
 claring himself the patronus Ecclesicz, and the malleus 
 kczreticorum, he secured a fresh lease of existence to 
 the declining Roman Empire. At what a cost to 
 Christianity and the world this Byzantine union of 
 Church and State was effected, history has very imper- 
 fectly described. Nothing, it is said, succeeds like sue-
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 cess ; and hence it is that Constantine's assumption of 
 a certain primacy over the Church was condoned. But 
 we must not forget the important fact that unless it had 
 been already corrupt it could not have been adopted by 
 Constantine at all. But the fact is, that one form of 
 corruption led on to another. Clericalism, which took 
 its rise when Cyprian asserted the monarchical theory 
 of Church government, culminated in Caesarism as soon 
 as the Emperor Constantine had discovered that Chris- 
 tianity could be employed as an engine of State. Thus 
 it is that since that fatal time, as Dante described the 
 funesta dote, its funeral dower of State dignity, Erastian- 
 ism and Ecclesiasticism have been the two poles be- 
 tween which all National Churches have ever since 
 oscillated. During the Middle Ages we find the Church 
 claiming a supremacy over the State; and since the 
 Reformation, generally speaking, the State has re- 
 taliated, and has asserted its supremacy over the 
 Church. 
 
 Thus it is that the struggle of these two principles of 
 Caesarism and Clericalism is the true key to Church his- 
 tory, and we may trace the various corruptions of 
 Christianity to the way in which these two opposing 
 tendencies have held their ground in the Church. There 
 is no prospect of either of these evils expelling the other, 
 nor should we even desire it. It appears, on the contrary, 
 that the one evil is permitted by God to counteract and 
 hold the other in check. Certain it is that as the first 
 decline of Christianity from the primitive standard of 
 purity was marked by the rise and extension of these 
 two tendencies, so its recovery will depend on our being 
 able to deal simultaneously, if possible, a death blow at
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 these twin evils. Together they grew and together they 
 must perish if the Church is ever to recover her primi- 
 tive purity and return to the simplicity of the truth as it 
 is in Jesus. 
 
 In confirmation of these views, we remark that a Free 
 Church in a Free State is a dream and a delusion unless 
 we can put down and abolish the hierarchical as well as 
 the Erastian principle. As M. de Laveleye remarks, in 
 a recent article on the subject, " Such a system as the 
 Cavour principle is only good for Protestant countries. 
 In a Catholic country it conducts directly to the enslave- 
 ment of the State and the absolute domination of the 
 Pope, as is to be seen in Belgium. The State professes 
 to ignore the Church and not to concern itself with it. 
 But the Church only admits the system provisionally, 
 and with a view of drawing from it the means of estab- 
 lishing its own power." Statesmen are coming to see 
 that a Free Church and a Free State are incompatible if 
 the so-called " Free Church," as soon as it is let loose 
 from the bonds of State, is worked as a sacerdotal 
 system, resting on a basis of dogmatic and traditional 
 authority solely, and opposing liberty of conscience and 
 private judgment. How a Free State is to deal with 
 those Churches which are sacerdotally organised, and 
 are, therefore, intolerant of all others not so organised, 
 is a problem which we need not discuss in this place. 
 But we notice it here in order to point out that the 
 question of Disestablishment is not so simple as some 
 suppose. To set the Church free from State control 
 and patronage is only one-half of our task. We must 
 also endeavour to free the laity from the bondage of 
 subjection to clerical authority. But it may be said that
 
 Preface. ix 
 
 the people will free themselves as soon as the Church is 
 disestablished. This may be so, and in a Protestant 
 country such as ours is, this would probably be the case 
 in the long run. Still we adhere to the opinion that 
 the two stages of liberation must go on together. Dis- 
 establishment will liberate the Church from Csesarism 
 only ; disendowment, or, which comes to the same thing, 
 the rigid application in every case of the voluntary 
 principle, must follow, in order to liberate the laity as 
 well from Clericalism. 
 
 It is not difficult to show from history that as these 
 two corruptions of Christianity arose at the same 
 time and from similar causes, so they must decline 
 together and in the same way. We shall point out in the 
 first place what the Church was intended to be her 
 primitive and ideal state, as seen in the Acts of the 
 Apostles and in the visions of the Apocalypse. We shall 
 then go on to describe what she has fallen to ; and, in 
 the third place, go on to trace the stages by which 
 she has declined from her primitive and ideal to her pre- 
 sent and actual state. In dealing with this question, 
 it is only fair, however, to the other side to show that 
 there was much to be said in excuse for those who, at 
 the time of the Reformation, still clung to the theory of 
 National Churches, or, in other words, to the Old Tes- 
 tament plan of a theocratic community, in which 
 Church and State are only the same society in its two 
 aspects as a civil and religious community. It is only 
 a noble delusion that can captivate and fascinate a 
 noble mind. A theory such as that, on which Calvin 
 and Hooker, Luther and Knox, were substantially 
 agreed, must have had much to commend it. It is 
 
 B
 
 x Preface. 
 
 mere prejudice not to admit this. We know that this 
 theory of the union, or rather fusion, of Church and 
 State was not so much as questioned till the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, and then only timidly and 
 tentatively by a few sectaries who were regarded as 
 fanatics and visionaries for disputing it. But the para- 
 doxes of one age become the commonplaces of another, 
 and so in our day the counter theory of the entire 
 separation of Church and State is slowly but surely 
 gaining ground. It is admitted on all sides that it is 
 the theory of the future. But how to deal with existing 
 institutions, how to lift society off from the one plane 
 of theocratic ideas, and to set it on the new plane of 
 religious neutrality on the part of the State, this is the 
 problem which is now exercising thoughtful minds in 
 all directions. 
 
 The aim, then, of this essay will be to point out that 
 we have at last reached a state of things in this country 
 in which continued compromise is impossible. We have 
 come to the conclusion that in England at present the 
 evils of a State Church largely outweigh any compen- 
 sating advantages. We shall accordingly devote a 
 chapter or two to this branch of the subject. We shall 
 cast up as fairly as we can the pros and cons of State 
 connection, and then strike the balance simply from a 
 utilitarian point of view. If, as may be shown, the 
 evils on the whole preponderate over the benefits, if 
 the result of the connection is felt to be that instead of 
 making the State spiritual it rather tends to make the 
 Church worldly, then the conclusion must follow that 
 the time has gone by for leaving the Establishment 
 intact under the hope that it will reform itself. It will
 
 Preface. xi 
 
 become the duty of Christian men in our day not 
 merely to content themselves with withdrawing from 
 the State Church into little spiritual societies of their 
 own, as they did two centuries ago. We are bound to 
 carry the question one step farther than our Puritan 
 forefathers, and to consummate the triumph of religious 
 liberty by obtaining religious equality as well. We 
 must labour to remove those invidious preferences 
 which the State still shows to one sect of Christians 
 over another in this country. 
 
 We have thus laid down the outlines of the argument. 
 It must be left to others to say whether such an argu- 
 ment commends itself to their judgment, and will help 
 to advance those foundation truths of the Gospel which 
 are dearer to all real Christians than any sect or party, 
 theory or system, of Church government. We may say 
 of ourselves that, though theoretically opposed to Estab- 
 lishments, we submitted to the bonds of the Act of 
 Uniformity and the Royal supremacy, those two pillars 
 on which our English Establishment rests, so long as we 
 conscientiously could. But when we found that this so- 
 called National Church has been for years past rapidly 
 degenerating into a sacerdotal sect, we felt convinced 
 that the time to protest had come. We find that the 
 National Church is honeycombed with unbelief through 
 the action of Erastianism and Ecclesiasticism ; and, 
 seeing no remedy for these evils but one, we take this 
 opportunity of laying before the public a dispassionate 
 statement of our reasons for desiring Disestablishment. 
 This book, in a word, is an answer to Mr. Gladstone's 
 ominous query, " Is the Church of England worth pre- 
 serving ? " 
 
 B 2
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE v 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The decline of the Church from the primitive standard of 
 
 purity traced to its source xvii 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE CHURCH AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE. 
 
 The Church was founded as an embodiment of the " King- 
 dom of Heaven." When it lost this idea of the " King- 
 dom," and was transformed into a hierarchy, it rapidly 
 declined i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MYTH-MAKING AGE OF CHURCH HISTORY. 
 
 Myth and legend contrasted. No legendary distortion of 
 facts possible, unless a mythical corruption of its idea 
 has already prevailed . 20 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE THREE TEMPTATIONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 A comparison between the three temptations of Christ and 
 those by which the Church has been assailed Bread, 
 or Endowment ; the kingdoms of this world, or Estab- 
 lishment ; and the pinnacle of the temple, or the Papal 
 supremacy . .'. . . . . . . 40
 
 xiv Table of Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CLERICALISM LEADS TO CJESARISM. 
 
 PACK 
 
 The connection between a Church State and a State Church 
 the constant tendency of the one form to pass into the 
 other . .63 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ENDOWMENT AND ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 Churches, as they decline in purity, fall back on endow- 
 ments as a machinery to keep up the original momentum. 
 This leads in the course of time to their establishment, 
 and so to their subjection to the State .... 82 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE THEORY. 
 
 Count Cavour's principle criticised. It is a question-begging 
 phrase, and must fail unless the sacerdotal principle 
 be first broken down . . ..... 97 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE THREE EVILS OF THE ENGLISH ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 Prelacy, Patronage, Purchase : its three great corruptions . 109 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SCEPTICISM AND SUPERSTITION. 
 
 These two developments of Ritualism invariably go together 132 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 TOLERATION. 
 
 History of the rise and growth of ideas of toleration . . 1 50
 
 Table of Contents. xv 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 CHURCH DEFENCE ITS ARGUMENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 The strength of the attack measured by that of the defence. 
 The argument stated that since the Church was never 
 formally established and endowed by the State it 
 cannot be disestablished and disendowed . . . 173 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE CHURCH IN DANGER. 
 
 This cry and its meaning dissected. It is the temporalities 
 
 which are attacked, hence the alarm .... 205 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 REFORM, NOT REVOLUTION. 
 
 The argument of the Evangelical party, that we should 
 " stand by the ship " and " put down Ritualism," con- 
 sidered 221 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE CONSERVATIVE ARGUMENT. 
 
 No one would think now-a-days of setting up an Establish- 
 ment ; but finding one in existence we are bound to 
 preserve it 242 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 
 
 Summary of arguments. The true road to the ultimate 
 reunion of Christendom lies in the return to primitive 
 simplicity as well of doctrine as of discipline . . . 256
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IT is impossible to consider the condition of the Church 
 in general, or of any of the Churches in particular, with- 
 out feeling that it is little less than chaotic. It may be 
 the chaos which precedes a new cosmos, but of the fact 
 of this fallen and disordered state there cannot be a 
 second opinion. To apply the remedy we must first 
 know the disease. To know what the Church has 
 fallen from, we must first ascertain what she was intended 
 to be. If she has failed in her mission, it must be on 
 account of some leaven of worldliness, some secret 
 principle of evil, hidden in her constitution from the 
 very first, and which led to an early falling away from 
 the primitive standard. We propose, therefore, to deal 
 with the question in hand under the three following 
 heads : 
 
 I. What the Church was intended to be. 
 II. What she has actually become. 
 
 III. The stages by which she descended from her 
 ideal to her present actual state. 
 
 The method which we purpose to follow is thus seen 
 to be that on which medical science has made such 
 advances in modern times. It took a long time before 
 it was understood that the laws of disease can only be
 
 xviii Introduction. 
 
 determined by first knowing the laws of health, and for 
 this reason medicine was an unprogressive science 
 almost down to our day. It was torn between con- 
 tending sects of dogmatists and empirics, between 
 those who had a Catholicon or universal remedy for 
 all ailments, and the compounding chemists who had as 
 many drugs as there were symptoms of the disease. Now, 
 at least, we know better than to attack the symptoms 
 in this way, and waste time on the outworks of the 
 fortress. We ascertain, in the first place, the laws of 
 health, and from the normal proceed to the abnormal. 
 It is in the same order that we should trace the cor- 
 ruptions of the Church to their source. We should 
 determine, in the first place, what the Church was in- 
 tended to be, and then consider what she has actually 
 become. The result of this comparison between the 
 ideal and the actual in other words, from her healthy 
 and unhealthy condition will suggest to us what the 
 disease is in itself, and where its seat lies. 
 
 I. With regard to the first question, the Church of 
 Christ was intended to become the manifestation of the 
 kingdom of God among men. In the words of the 
 Lord's Prayer, God's will was to be done on earth as 
 in heaven. The Church was to be the manifestation of 
 those principles in their operation among men, a spec- 
 tacle which, according to the apostle (Eph. iii. 10), 
 would display even to the principalities and powers in 
 heavenly places, by the Church, the manifold wisdom 
 of God. Thus the kingdom of God and the Church of 
 Christ are related to each other as a force and its em- 
 bodiment ; or as a motive power and the machine by 
 which it acts. It is instructive here to remark that
 
 Introduction. xix 
 
 Christ, during His ministry on earth, dwelt almost ex- 
 clusively on the kingdom of God. All His parables 
 are illustrations of this ; His preaching was that the 
 kingdom of heaven was at hand. The apostles, on the 
 other hand, after the Holy Ghost had been given, and a 
 society formed to embody and set forth these principles, 
 go on to describe the Church and assume its existence. 
 When Christ was on earth the Church was not yet 
 formed, it was taken, as we may so say, as Eve was, 
 from the pierced side of the sleeping Adam. It has 
 been thus bought by His blood that He might present 
 it to Himself, a glorious Church, not having spot, or 
 wrinkle, or any such thing. The Church is thus con- 
 stituted as a society to set forth the hidden Saviour to 
 men. In this sense it is His Body, the fulness of Him, 
 that filleth all in all. It embodies His hidden spirit, 
 and manifests the mind of Christ among men in the 
 same way that Christ, the Eternal Word, embodies and 
 manifests the will of God in the worlds above. 
 
 II. We have only to glance at this, her ideal state, to 
 see how far short her actual state is from it. So far 
 from the kingdom of God having been set up on earth, 
 the Church, as a society, has become one of the king- 
 doms of this world. She has been regulated by its 
 principles, and has submitted to its rules of action. In 
 defiance (Luke xxii. 25) of her Master's expressed 
 command, she has organised herself as a hierarchy with 
 gradations of rank, forgetting that he who would be 
 chief, must first be servant of all. It is almost a pro- 
 fane parody of this great truth, that the head of the 
 most despotic hierarchy in the world should call himself 
 servus servorum Dei. It is thus with a sort of pride
 
 xx Introduction. 
 
 which apes humility he assumes by implication one of 
 the titles of Him who came not to be ministered to but 
 to minister, and who, in proof of this, took a towel and 
 girded Himself, and washed His disciples' feet. Even 
 this function of Christ has been turned into a sort of 
 ostentatious badge of kingship on the part of Popes 
 and Emperors, the most Christian King of Spain and 
 His Apostolic Majesty of Austria vicing with the Pope 
 in thus assuming to do the works of Christ, without 
 having caught any of the spirit in which those works 
 were done. 
 
 III. This leads us, in the third place, to ascertain 
 what the cause of corruption is, by comparing the ideal 
 with the actual state of the Church. The corruption 
 entered, as we have seen, with the hierarchical principle 
 in other words, from forgetting that the kingdom of 
 heaven is not governed by gradations of rank, as in the 
 kingdoms of this world. Passing out of the stage of 
 little religious republics or commonwealths, such as the 
 apostles founded in Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and else- 
 where, the Gospel, when it reached Rome, soon fell 
 under the influence of the Roman idea of a great cen- 
 tralised Monarchy. It thus soon lost its simplicity, and 
 by the age of Cyprian the Monarchical principle had 
 overshadowed the Republican ; organisation took the 
 place of life, uniformity of unity, and thus the way was 
 prepared for its being converted into a national cult by 
 Constantine, and treated as a department of State. Its 
 bishops became prelates a term of office borrowed 
 from the Byzantine Empire their dioceses corresponded 
 to the civil divisions of the Empire, and so it entered 
 on that stage of subjection of the ecclesiastical to the
 
 Introduction. xxi 
 
 civil supremacy which Dollinger has aptly described as 
 Byzantinism. 
 
 Its history ever since is little else than the conflict 
 between the two opposite tyrannies of Clericalism and 
 Caesarism. During the Middle Ages, the Pope and the 
 Emperor were the respective champions of these two 
 principles ; nor did the Reformation put an end to this 
 long conflict, as some Protestants fondly imagine. It only 
 asserted the royal supremacy over the sacerdotal, which 
 was a clear gain on the whole for the liberties of the 
 Church and the world, but a gain which was obtained 
 by setting up one tyranny to check another. Ever since, 
 and in the majority of cases, as far as Europe is con- 
 cerned, the Church has been locked in the fatal embrace 
 of the State. The two tendencies known as Eras- 
 tianism and Ecclesiasticism have been struggling ever 
 since in the womb of modern society, like the twins 
 Esau and Jacob, and the only remedy for this un- 
 natural conflict is the birth of a State which shall be 
 purely secular, and of a Church which shall be purely 
 spiritual. The so-called National Churches of the Re- 
 formation have, without an exception, failed to reach 
 this standard of a purely spiritual society. It was im- 
 possible, from the nature of the case, that they should 
 do so. Their temporalities as such dragged them down 
 into a fatal alliance with the Civil Power. The best 
 and purest of these reformed Churches, that of Scot- 
 land, for instance, however faithful her protest against 
 Erastianism, has had to admit, by the secession of 
 1843, that she was in a false position. Her nationalism 
 was little else than the Protestant counterpart of Ultra- 
 montanism, the position, namely, that while it was the
 
 xxii Introduction. 
 
 duty of the Civil Power to cherish and protect her, 
 she, on the other hand, had no reciprocal duties to that 
 Civil Power. The Free Church of Scotland is thus un- 
 learning, under Voluntaryism, the mistaken theories of 
 the seventeenth century. She is slowly reaching the 
 truth that all endowed Churches are Establishments in 
 the germ, and partake of the nature of Establishments. 
 Thus Clericalism and Caesarism are departures from the 
 simplicity of the Gospel which exist as the counterpart 
 the one of the other. They stand or fall together, and 
 the road to a true and final reform lies in abandoning 
 both principles alike. 
 
 Our purpose, then, is to point out the evil, under the 
 conviction that the remedy will suggest itself. Thus 
 a mere separation of Church and State by Act of Parlia- 
 ment, though a step in the right direction, is not enough. 
 It is conceivable, indeed, that the first result of such a 
 separation might be, as we see is the case with Ultra- 
 montanism on the Continent, to set up a hierarchical 
 society more arrogant and intolerant than ever. Cavour's 
 maxim of a " Free Church in a Free State " is thus only 
 a plausible sophism, unless we are careful to define what 
 we mean by a Free Church and a Free State. If we 
 mean a Church like the Roman hierarchy in Italy, or 
 such as the Disestablished Church in England might 
 become, then we can understand why some thoughtful 
 men hesitate to consent to this arrangement. To use 
 the argument of Sir John Lubbock, they say that of 
 two evils the present is the least ; they prefer, in other 
 words, Caesarism to Clericalism. But this need not be 
 so. Let a Free Church only be understood in the sense 
 of a spiritual society as the kingdom of God, which
 
 Introduction. xxiii 
 
 " is not meat and drink but righteousness and joy and 
 peace in the Holy Ghost ; " let this society have the 
 minimum of organisation and the maximum of free in- 
 dividual life ; let its only law be love to Christ, and 
 its only bond be that of " chanty, which is the bond of 
 perfectness " (Col. iii. 14) ; and then such a Free Church 
 never can come into collision with the powers that be. 
 It will owe no man anything but to love one another. 
 We are aware that we are speaking parables to those 
 whose ideas of religion are only legal, and who take a 
 regulative view of religion. But for those who have risen 
 beyond these Old Testament conceptions, and who have 
 caught a glimpse of the true idea of the kingdom of 
 God among men, such a conception of a Free Church 
 in a Free State will not seem a mere chimera. They 
 will see in the Church of Christ an embodiment of the 
 ideal or millennial state of society an ideal, it is true, 
 which we have never reached as yet, but which one of 
 the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the 
 seven last plagues showed to St. John, when he said, 
 " Come hither, and I will show thee the bride, the Lamb's 
 wife." As yet that Church is invisible. The new and 
 holy Jerusalem has not yet descended from heaven as 
 a bride adorned for her bridegroom. Like her Lord, at 
 present, she is within the veil, and will not be fully mani- 
 fested till His appearing. But all questions of Church 
 reform must lead up to this consummation, or they are 
 worse than useless. Then, and then only, will the Hooker 
 ideal of a Church and State, which are only different 
 names for the same thing, become actual and possible. 
 For the present it is better, because truer to fact, that 
 we should recognise the contrast between the Church
 
 xxiv Introduction. 
 
 and the world a contrast which we can no more 
 bridge over by any theory of alliance or concomitance 
 than we can reconcile the contrast between flesh and 
 spirit. At present, these are contrary the one to the other, 
 and he is the best Christian as well as the wisest 
 statesman who accepts the facts as they are, and works 
 on towards the day of the restitution of all things, when 
 the great cry shall be heard, " the kingdoms of this 
 world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of 
 His Christ" 
 
 I propose, then, to trace the degeneracy of the Church 
 to its source, in the fact of its failing to uphold this 
 contrast between the kingdom of heaven and the king- 
 doms of this world. The only organisation which 
 should have been recognised by the Church was that 
 suggested by the text, " Neither be ye called masters, 
 for one is your Master, even Christ." Instead of that, it 
 fell under the hierarchical principle as soon as it reached 
 Rome, and the Church, even before it was established 
 under Constantine, became a weak copy of the mon- 
 archical forms of the Empire. Can we wonder that it 
 soon degenerated into a centralised despotism ? From 
 Cyprian to Hildebrand there is but one step, and Con- 
 stantine helped it to take that step. That was a 
 splendid sophism which misled so holy and pure a 
 nature as that of Richard Hooker, the author of the 
 " Ecclesiastical Polity." Relying on an analogy from 
 the heavenly hierarchy, for which there is nothing what- 
 ever in Scripture, but a good deal in the writings of the 
 pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite, he conceived of the 
 Church as a polity, with orders and gradations of rank 
 and office corresponding, each to each, to the ranks and
 
 Introduction. xxv 
 
 degrees of men in civil life. The Church was thus sup- 
 posed to be the double of the State the one being the 
 nation in its relation to man, and the other in its rela- 
 tion Godward. It is a noble theory as wrought out in 
 his eloquent pages, and prefaced by one of the sublimest 
 impersonations of law which ever came from an unin- 
 spired pen. But the illusions of genius are dangerous 
 in proportion, as they can be so easily twisted into 
 chains for fettering free thought and enforcing a spiritual 
 despotism. But for Hooker a Laud would have been 
 impossible. It is another illustration of the old maxim, 
 corruptio optimi pessima. On this account, if we would 
 guard truth, we must jealously watch the first approaches 
 of error. It is too late to strike at the hierarchical prin- 
 ciple when it has developed into some monstrous form 
 of arrogance or impiety in a Hildebrand or a Borgia; 
 we must look for the beginnings of the evil when the 
 mystery of iniquity is already to be seen in the germ. 
 The danger of dallying with Church principles, as they 
 are commonly called, and drawing the line at some 
 arbitrary point somewhere between the fourth and the 
 fourteenth century, has been often pointed out. It 
 reminds us of the story of a man who kept some tiger's 
 whelps, whom he treated as playmates, until one day, 
 when he was asleep, one of the cubs licked his hand till 
 it had drawn blood, on which the man awoke, saw his 
 danger, and at once killed his former playmate. The 
 Anglican and Old Catholic theory of religion both 
 labour under this fatal weakness, and there is something 
 in it which falls in with and flatters one of our national 
 defects namely, our love of compromise and dislike of 
 a rigorous logical theory, whether on politics or religion. 
 
 C
 
 xxvi Introdiiction. 
 
 But surely Christianity can be either nothing at all, or 
 it is something more than an improved type of Judaism, 
 with its hierocracy (to use Ewald's term, which is more 
 expressive than theocracy) modernised and developed. 
 The rule of Christ, that a tree is known by its fruits, is 
 applicable to this as to other things. How can we ex- 
 pect spiritual fruits from a carnal Judaical institution ? 
 Men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. 
 No reform, then, of the Church is worth much which 
 does not go down to this root-principle of the hierarchy. 
 Here was the germ of all the apostacy, which began 
 long before Constantine, and which has lasted down 
 long after the Reformation. It is this which has in- 
 fected the Reformed Churches and made their testimony 
 to the truth as it is in Jesus almost as feeble and 
 powerless as that of the pre-Reformation Church itself. 
 It is, moreover, our failure to see this which makes the 
 separation of Church and State on the Cavour maxim 
 of a Free Church in a Free State a mockery, a delusion, 
 and a snare. Disestablishment will only be another 
 name for re-Establishment, if the Church is to set up 
 for itself again as an organised hierarchy. If dis- 
 endowed to-day, it will be re-endowed to-morrow, if 
 the roots of sacerdotalism are left in the soil. Like 
 Nebuchadnezzar's tree cut down to a stump, and with 
 a band of iron and brass round it, it will spring up 
 again if its roots are to be left in the ground, and to be 
 wet with the dews of heaven. Csesarism, indeed, and 
 Clericalism go together. The one evil calls out the 
 other into existence, and perhaps in the providence of 
 God it is intended that Caesarism should act as a check 
 to Clericalism. The mere political Nonconformist, then,
 
 Introduction. xxvii 
 
 who can see only the evils of Caesarism, and calls out 
 for Disestablishment, pure and simple, as the panacea 
 for all the corruptions of the Church, might find himself 
 mistaken if he had his wishes, and could carry his point 
 at one sweep. The right plan is to seek to abate both 
 forms of corruption simultaneously. We must go back 
 on the work of our Protestant reformers of the sixteenth 
 century more thoroughly, and carry out their principles 
 still more trenchantly than they were willing or able 
 to do. They could not see, as we now do, that the 
 spiritual Babylon is a tree like that of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's dream. It is not enough to " hew down the 
 tree, cut off his branches, shake off his leaves, and 
 scatter his fruit," if the " stump of his roots is left in 
 the earth." On this account we are of opinion that no 
 half reforms, and no mere political coup d'eglise, like 
 that which disestablished the Irish Church, is enough. 
 It may be that the loss of a political status in other 
 words, the decline of Caesarism may lead to the 
 decline of Clericalism. But it is quite possible, as 
 we see in the case of modern Ultramontanism, that 
 Clericalism may revive on the ruins of Caesarism, and 
 in that case it is better to leave Erastianism untouched 
 for the present as the natural check to Ecclesiasticism. 
 The two counteracting forces having grown up together 
 may be left to decline together. On this question of 
 detail men may differ ; but the point at present is to 
 see where the root of the evil lies, so that we may act 
 on the safe Baconian rule, that we cannot apply the 
 remedy till we have first explored the seat of the 
 disease. It is within these limits, therefore, that our 
 inquiry proceeds, and to this point our argument 
 leads up.
 
 OSSARISM AND CLERICALISM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE CHURCH AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE. 
 
 OUR first inquiry is, what the Church was intended to 
 be ; and to understand this we must have some concep- 
 tion of the meaning of the expression, " the kingdom of 
 God." If we turn to the New Testament we find that 
 our Lord's teaching was almost entirely concerning the 
 kingdom of heaven. Only once or twice, and that in- 
 cidentally, with reference to that kingdom, does He 
 refer to an ecclesia or society which was to exhibit 
 and embody these inward principles. The difference 
 between the preaching of John and of Jesus was this 
 that the one proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven 
 was at hand, the other that the kingdom of heaven 
 was already among them, that it was suffering violence, 
 and that the violent took it by force. At the same 
 time He added, as a warning against carnal concep- 
 tions and Judaising ideas of the Messiah, that this 
 kingdom came not with observation or outward pomp. 
 It was not, Lo here, or, Lo there, but it was an internal 
 and spiritual kingdom ; as the Apostle Paul elsewhere 
 explains, it was not meat and drink i.e., a repe- 
 tition of Jewish ritual and ceremonial observances 
 
 i
 
 2 The Church as it was Intended to be, 
 
 but righteousness and joy, and peace in the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 Christ came, then, to set up the true kingdom'of God 
 upon earth. By this we mean, that He came to in- 
 culcate certain principles, and to form a society of 
 which these principles were to become the animating 
 motive. In the true order of thought, the idea 
 of the kingdom of God comes before that of the 
 Church; whereas in our popular teaching, and even 
 among devout people, who ought to know better, it 
 is precisely the reverse. They hold that, in some sense, 
 Christ has planted a Church on earth a body of be- 
 lievers, that is, in the doctrines which He taught, and 
 in the miracles which He wrought. They also hold 
 that this Church, which is militant now on earth, will 
 be by-and-by triumphant, and that Christ's kingdom 
 will only then have come when the kingdoms of this 
 world shall have become the kingdoms of our Lord and 
 of His Christ. They thus reason, so to speak, prepos- 
 terously. They put the last first, and the first last. 
 They begin with the Church, whereas the inspired writer 
 of the book which is called the Acts of the Apostles, 
 strikes a different note in the opening verses of that 
 narrative, which is a continuation of the Gospel history. 
 He regards it as the evangel of the Lord Christ from 
 heaven, as the former treatise was the evangel of the 
 Son of Man on earth. To the question of the disciples 
 still under bondage to Jewish ideas, " Lord, wilt Thou 
 at this time restore the kingdom to Israel ? " Christ 
 distinctly tells them that it is not a question of times 
 and seasons at all. The kingdom of God was to 
 begin as soon as they were endued with power from
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 3 
 
 on high, and then they should see that kingdom take 
 shape in a new and spiritual society, utterly unlike 
 any which they had before either seen or looked for. 
 Not more than ten days after this the kingdom of God 
 began. It was set up in the hearts of a few disciples 
 a hundred and, twenty in all who were assembled 
 together in one place, and who were of one heart. 
 There was first unum cor, and only afterwards una via. 
 Unity produced uniformity, not in the reverse order, 
 as we too often look for the blessing. The internal led 
 to the external, not the reverse. The Church had no 
 other meaning than this as the embodiment of those 
 spiritual principles which the apostle sums up as 
 " Christ in you the hope of glory." There would be 
 no need for any such society at all if the principles of 
 that kingdom had been already understood among 
 men.* But they were not. The Jewish Church had 
 utterly failed to embody the true idea of the kingdom 
 of God among men. Instead of a kingdom of priests 
 i.e. y a race of men dedicated to the service of God 
 Israel was, at best, nothing more than a race of reli- 
 gionists, holding Monotheism, it is true, as other races 
 clung to Polytheism, but in little else contrasted with 
 the nations around them. The Jewish Church had 
 failed because it was a theocracy in name, while, in 
 reality, it was only a hierocracy. They had fallen more 
 or less under the caste system, common to Egypt, India, 
 and other Oriental nations. There was a warrior caste 
 and a priestly caste, and underneath these a degraded 
 mass of the common people, to whom no particular 
 
 * For some truly suggestive thoughts as to the inner meaning of the 
 Book of the Acts of the Apostles, see Baumgarten on the Acts by far the 
 most suggestive Commentary on this subject which we can refer to. 
 
 I 2
 
 4 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 functions were assigned, and whose only duty it was to 
 obey their superiors in Church and State. As has 
 been often remarked (by no one better than the late 
 J. S. Mill, in his treatise on Liberty), if it had not been 
 for the prophets, who were of no caste at all, but were 
 extraordinary men, raised up to fulfil an extraordinary 
 mission, the light would have died out altogether in 
 Israel. As it was, God kept the sacred fire alight by 
 a succession of prophets, irregular and informal, and 
 whose only mark of distinction was that they wandered 
 about in sheep skins and goat skins, being destitute, 
 afflicted, tormented, 
 
 " Unasked their toil, ungrateful their advice, 
 
 Starving their gains, and martyrdom their price." 
 
 The Jewish Church thus failed to see that the Church 
 was intended to embody the kingdom. Let us turn now 
 to the Gentiles, and see how far they, too, have failed. 
 There is no doubt as to what the early Church was 
 designed to be. To a great extent, in the apostles' 
 day, at least, it came up to this glorious ideal. We find 
 in the earliest times of all, little communities of be- 
 lievers planted out in the world, in it but not of it. 
 These societies were in no sense called out from the 
 world to form a new institution, which we describe 
 as the Church. This is the mistake of ecclesiastical 
 historians. It came to this, as a matter of fact. As 
 early as Cyprian's and Tertullian's days, the Church 
 became a visible community, already in dangerous 
 rivalry with the Empire a secret society, which the 
 Empire could neither disband nor mould to its pur- 
 poses. Hence the persecutions of the early Church 
 arose from this suspicion not in every case ill-founded
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 5 
 
 that the Church was a conspiracy against the Empire. 
 This explains the fact that it was not the most careless, 
 but the most politic and conscientious of the Caesars 
 a Trajan, a Decius, and a Diocletian that were the 
 bitterest persecutors. But who was to blame for this ? 
 Church historians, taking the most rhetorical of the 
 apologists, Tertullian, for their authority, throw the 
 blame of this entirely on the Emperors. It was a 
 case, they say, of Herod troubled at the birth of the 
 child King, and slaying the infants, that so he might 
 get rid of a possible rival. Herod's conduct was of a 
 piece with his general character it was only one more 
 wanton act of a tyrant, of whom it was said, better be 
 Herod's sow than his wife. But wanton cruelty was not 
 the motive in the case, at least, of the later persecutions. 
 Christians had begun to menace the tranquillity of the 
 Empire. There is no disguising the fact, that besides 
 the contrast which their lives presented to that of 
 the Pagans, there was about them the air of a secret 
 society. Hence the direction of the Apostle Peter, 
 " Let no man suffer as an evil doer," was not so super- 
 fluous as it seems to us. The Christian Church had 
 grown out of the Jewish, and it often displayed that 
 tumultuous spirit which, according to Tacitus, led to 
 the banishment of the Jews from Rome. There was 
 always a danger of a spiritual principle degenerating 
 into a carnal commandment. This was the very first 
 corruption of Christianity, when the Church, instead of 
 an embodiment of the kingdom, became a society 
 having its own organisation not a means to an end, 
 but an end in itself. As soon as this corruption began, 
 the Church had descended from its true ideal ; it was
 
 6 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 no longer the visible symbol of an invisible principle. 
 It had ceased to be the body of Christ, the fulness of 
 Him that filleth all in all, and it had become instead 
 a religious society, having in it, it is true, the ark of 
 salvation for a decaying world; but it was no longer 
 that which the German school of Roman Catholic 
 mystics have feigned it to be the continued incar- 
 nation of Christ upon earth, the embodiment in a 
 human society of that Divine life whose fulness fills 
 all in all. 
 
 We have only to glance at the meaning of the 
 earliest name for the Church in order to see what it 
 was intended to become. The Church, eic/cX^crta, was an 
 assembly a jury, as we should say of citizens, called 
 out for a particular purpose, and set apart from their 
 fellow-citizens only for a definite term. True, there were 
 tumultuous assemblies at times (Acts xix. 32), called by 
 this name ; but the intentional use of this term, as 
 applied to a mere mob, is explained by the words of 
 the town clerk, in verse 39 : " It shall be inquired into 
 (> rfj evvofiw eKfcXtja-ia), by alawful ecclesia" As we 
 should say in modern phrase, a commission of inquiry 
 was to be instituted, a jury of citizens empannelled, 
 and by their verdict the whole matter set right. An 
 ecclesia, then, meant, not a permanent assembly, but a 
 special commission to try and decide a special case. 
 The use of the word, by the LXX., as equivalent 
 to ^np, confirms this. This word, which we rightly 
 render congregation, is the literal transcript of ecclesia. 
 Both retain the same root idea of calling, bp fcaXeiv. 
 The crier called out certain citizens to meet on a special 
 commission. As long as they were set apart for these
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 7 
 
 special duties they were exempted from every other. 
 But the service was an occasional one, and, so far from 
 implying separation from the general mass of the 
 citizens, implied the very reverse. The congregations 
 of Israel were, in the same manner, only committees, 
 as we should say, of the House, who were to report 
 to the House their proceedings. Sometimes, as in our 
 Parliamentary practice, the whole House was in com- 
 mittee, and then, by a kind of fiction, it reported to 
 itself its own proceedings. It is instructive to trace in 
 this way the true idea of the Church, since otherwise 
 we shall not be able to see the contrast between what 
 the Church was intended to be, and what it after- 
 wards became. Church history, as distinct from the 
 world's history, is probably one of those " after-thoughts 
 of theology" which have done so much mischief in 
 setting men's minds on a wrong track in their search 
 after truth. The primitive ecclesia was only a congre- 
 gation, called at first out of the Israel after the flesh 
 and then out of the Gentiles ; but in both cases, whether 
 of the circumcision or uncircumcision, the ecclesia was 
 only a temporary arrangement or provision to meet a 
 particular need. Our Lord's phrases have been distorted, 
 and a non-natural meaning given to them, not merely 
 by Roman Catholic divines, but by those also who 
 should know better. His promise to Peter of the keys 
 referred only to "the kingdom of heaven " i.e., to those 
 spiritual truths of His Messiahship and mission. In con- 
 nection with this kingdom there was to be an ecclesia 
 for all time, which was to embody that truth and pro- 
 claim it ; and this assembly was to be as imperishable 
 as the principle which it affirmed. As a matter of fact,
 
 8 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 this has been so. Wherever the kingdom of heaven has 
 been preached, and the keys have been used to unlock 
 human hearts and to open doors barred by prejudice, 
 there an assembly has not been wanting to carry on 
 this work. Thus, the ecclesia is the subordinate, not 
 the leading, thought in the Lord's argument. But ft 
 is an old failing of human nature to lose sight of what 
 is essential in an argument, and seize on the acci- 
 dental and secondary part of a truth. The keys have 
 been made the symbol of authority, not of use as if a 
 key were designed for any other purpose but one. The 
 key is not a symbol of kingly power, like a globe 
 and sceptre ; it is the symbol of the chamberlain's office. 
 We find it applied by Isaiah to Shebna, the scribe. 
 The kingdom of heaven, and the mode of opening it 
 by the Gospel key of persuasion and preaching this is 
 the essential part of the Lord's promise to Peter. The 
 accidental and secondary thought is, that an ecclesia 
 should be built upon this truth, and that this ecclesia 
 should have this one element of permanence in a world 
 of change, that the gates of the grave should never 
 open to receive it. The " society " of the kingdom was 
 to be as perpetual as the kingdom itself; but its per- 
 petuity is to be sought, not in any single type, but 
 in the fact that, as one type died and disappeared, 
 another was to take its place. 
 
 Thus, if we understand the ecclesia and its relation to 
 the kingdom, all becomes clear which was before con- 
 fused. We see, on the one hand, the relation of the 
 Church to the kingdom is that of form to essence, or of 
 a type to its idea. We see, on the other hand, that the 
 relation of the Church to the world is one, not of sepa-
 
 TJie Church as it was Intended to be. 9 
 
 ration, but of contact and of commixture. Augustine, 
 more than any other divine, is responsible for drawing 
 the contrast so sharply, and in such an external way, 
 between the Church and the world. In this he carried 
 out, only too faithfully, the hard and harsh contrasts of 
 Tertullian on the same subject. The whole of the North 
 African school Cyprian, Tertullian, Augustine are 
 responsible for this externalising of the Church. It is 
 the root error of all the Augustinian school, of the 
 sacerdotal party in one extreme, of the Puritans in 
 the other. The Alexandrian school did not fall 
 into this error. They, on the contrary, laid stress 
 on the opposite truth, that God was in the world as 
 the Logos or Light of man before He became incar- 
 nate, as the true Light which lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world. They saw and seized the true 
 idea of the philosophy of history. They did not set 
 up a harsh external contrast, like that of Augustine, 
 between two cities, the city of God and the city of 
 the devil a conception which, however assimilated 
 since and absorbed in our traditional theology, is still, 
 as to its origin, half Manichsean. This is Bossuet's 
 philosophy of history, with his two distinct sections of 
 sacred and profane history, to be read in parallel 
 columns. But the Alexandrian school saw farther than 
 this. They saw the education of the human race under 
 tutors and governors, some Jewish, some Gentile, but 
 all leading up to the fulness of times. Thus Clement 
 of Alexandria taught that Plato was Moses Atticising, 
 and that the Preparation of the Gospel was to be seen 
 in Greek culture as well as in Jewish ritual. 
 
 All this bears on the question of the Ecdesia. It was
 
 io The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 intended to be a little society in the world, and acting 
 on it as leaven or salt does. It was to be incorporated, 
 it is true, as a distinct society, but only in the same 
 way, and to the same extent, as physicians, or painters, 
 or musicians are into colleges' of medicine, or art, 
 or music for convenience' sake. But a college of sur- 
 geons exercising judicial functions, and claiming certain 
 governmental rights, would be an " imperium in imperio" 
 which no well-governed State could tolerate. All weak 
 governments tend to this internal decay by conniving 
 at the imperium in imperio principle. It is the weak 
 point in feudalism. We see how it brought the Mero- 
 vingian dynasty to ruin in France, and it was this 
 which the strongest of our Plantagenet kings stood out 
 against with the true instinct of self-preservation. In 
 the East it has brought Japan to the brink of ruin, and 
 the first sign of the revival of the German Empire is 
 that it applies its blood-and-iron policy to put down this 
 Ultramontane attempt to assert that the Church is 
 more than a collegium, and is an actual imperium. The 
 assertion of Pope Gregory is the key to all Ultra- 
 montane pretensions : Quod solus possit Papa uti 
 imperialibus insigniis. We have here, in the boldest 
 form, the claim of supremacy put forth, and wherever 
 this is asserted or implied, there the conflict between 
 Church and State is inevitable. The remedy for this 
 is not merely to assert the supremacy of the State over 
 the Church, as the Reformation did ; we must go 
 further, and cut down ecclesiasticism to the roots by 
 asserting that the Church is no imperium, at all, but 
 simply a collegium a tolerated or chartered society, if 
 you will, but still a society embodied for one definite
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 1 1 
 
 purpose only, as a temperance society is to promote 
 temperance, or an art society is to promote the in- 
 terests of art. 
 
 The members of this society form an ecclesia called 
 out, for the time being, from the mass of the citizens, 
 but in no other way distinguished from them, much less 
 separated from them. It is instructive to remark that 
 as long as the Greek and Hebrew idea of the ecclesia 
 as a mere club or congregation continued, no collision 
 was possible between the Church and the Empire. On 
 the contrary, as is well known, the Empire protected 
 the infant Church from the persecution of its early 
 enemy, the Jewish Church. In the language of the 
 Apocalypse, the earth helped the woman. But as soon 
 asLatin Christianity arose, and governmental ideas 
 entered the Church in consequence of the Roman type 
 of mind inclining to organisation and hierarchy, then, 
 and not before, we hear of the Church becoming a mark 
 of suspicion and dislike. 
 
 The early churches planted by the apostles were 
 little commonwealths of believers organised on a 
 republican type. The ecclesia was a club which met 
 weekly to promote the spiritual concerns of its mem- 
 bers. In many respects, the Jewish synagogue was the 
 type according to which the early churches even among 
 the Gentiles were organised. The bishop or presbyter 
 for the two terms denote the one, the rank or age the 
 other, the office of the pastor corresponded to the ruler 
 of the synagogue. There were elders as well as deacons, 
 to keep order and receive and distribute the alms. But 
 the central principle of the service was didactic, not 
 sacrificial. No part of the ritual suggested, in any
 
 12 The Church as it -was Intended to be. 
 
 way, the thought of the temple services. Altars there 
 were none, priesthood was unknown ; and phrases such 
 as those which meet us in the fourth century, rhetori- 
 cally used, it is true, and not dogmatical and precise, as 
 to the dreadful sacrifice, and the sacred mysteries, and 
 so forth, would have sounded strange in the ears of a 
 Christian of the first century. The synagogue, in fact, 
 and the ecclesia, were in early times convertible terms. 
 In one memorable passage in the LXX. version (Prov. 
 v. 14) the two words e/e/cX^o-ta and <rvvayw<yij, destined 
 to have such divergent histories, to be representatives 
 of such contrasted systems, appear in close juxtaposi- 
 tion. In the Jewish branch of the Christian Church 
 0-^1/070)777 was probably long used, as we find from 
 James ii. 2, as the usual name for the place of meeting 
 for believers. We have no reason to suppose that with 
 the same word applied to the building the practices 
 and ritual were not identical, or nearly so, allowing for 
 the differences between those who believed that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was the Messiah, and those who did not. 
 The name synagogue, and with it the ideas which it 
 connoted of doctrinal as opposed to sacrificial and 
 symbolical teaching, passed over from the Jewish to the 
 Gentile Church. We find the term applied to Chris- 
 tian meetings by Ignatius. Even in Clement of Alex- 
 andria the two words appear united, as they had done 
 in the LXX., eVl rrjv a-vvaycoyrjv e/e/cX^cr/a? (Strom, vi. 
 p. 633). Afterwards, when the chasm between Judaism 
 and Christianity became wider, Christian writers began 
 to contrast the meaning of the two words as if they had 
 originally diverged from the very first, and endeavoured 
 to show how the ecclesia excelled the synagogue. (See
 
 TJte Church as it was Intended to be. 13 
 
 Augustine's, Enar. in Ps. Ixxx., and Trench's Syno- 
 nyms of New Test. s. i.) But this only proves that, by 
 the middle of the fourth century, one form of Judaism had 
 been replaced by another, and that the didactic element 
 of the synagogue service had been supplanted by the 
 sacrificial and priestly ideas of the temple service. 
 So long as the temple was standing, and real animal 
 sacrifices were offered on the brazen altar, the thought 
 of an order of sacrificing priests would have struck 
 the early Church as an irreverent parody of an old 
 and worn-out ritual. The writer of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews remarks that this ritual of bloody sacrifices 
 was decaying and waxing old, and ready to pass 
 away. It was obsolete ; the life and meaning had 
 gone out of it even before the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem had formally put an end to it "We have an 
 altar," he adds referring to Calvary, where Christ was 
 crucified outside the camp "of which they have no 
 right to eat who serve the tabernacle." Selecting the 
 annual sin-offering, not the daily burnt-offering, as the 
 truest type of the sacrifice of Christ once and for ever, 
 he goes on to show that as the sin-offering was burned 
 outside the camp with every mark of abhorrence, so 
 Christ, the despised and rejected of men, suffered with- 
 out the gate, and he urges his half-hearted brethren to 
 follow him outside the camp of Judaism. He calls on 
 them to dissent from the unspiritual ceremonies of their 
 old cult, and to remember that their only altar of sacri- 
 fice was that cross on which their Master was hung up 
 in mockery and derision by the world. This altar of 
 Calvary was the place where His followers could offer 
 the only sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving which is
 
 14 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 acceptable to God, by becoming, like Him, crucified to 
 the world and its affections and lusts. This is the only 
 intelligible meaning of that much-disputed passage, 
 and it is decisive, if we had no other proof of the ideas 
 of the early Church, as to the absence of priest, of 
 liturgy, or of ritual from the reasonable service of the 
 first generation of believers. 
 
 As time went on, however, and as the Jewish temple 
 and its animal sacrifices became a thing of the past, 
 Paganism itself began to feel the same vitalising breath 
 of truth which made animal sacrifices impossible any 
 longer in Israel, since Christ had come, and by His death 
 exhausted their meaning. It was only as late as the 
 Theodosian code that sacrifices were formally abolished, 
 but long before then they had fallen into disuse. Two 
 centuries previous to the external triumph of Christianity, 
 its internal spirit had triumphed. But the consequence 
 was, that as the sacrificial ideas had died out of Judaism 
 first, and afterwards even of Paganism, so they stole 
 in, as it were, by a back door into the Christian Church. 
 Priest and sacrifice suggest inseparable ideas they 
 stand or fall together. It is absurd to argue as if the 
 sacrificial idea in the Christian Eucharist had brought 
 in after it the priestly theory, or the converse. The 
 truth is, that the two rise and fall together. The priest 
 and the altar are inseparable as the soldier and his 
 sword ; the one without the other is utterly powerless. 
 The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews evidently 
 argued in this way, and having demolished the preten- 
 sions of the Aaronic priesthood to be unchangeable in 
 the first part of the epistle, he disposes of the claims 
 of the ritual itself in the second part.
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 15 
 
 With such a document before them, and with the 
 traditions of the synagogue service as contrasted with 
 the temple, it was not easy for the early Church to go 
 wrong. Indeed, it was not for nearly four centuries 
 that the leaven of Judaising priestcraft began to work. 
 The errors of the first three centuries are on speculative 
 more than on ceremonial religion. Whatever the fail- 
 ings of the Alexandrian schools may have been in the 
 direction of gnosis, it was not an enslavement to the 
 senses, that unmanly, irrational sensualism ^vhich is one 
 of the weak attempts of our age to bank out the en- 
 croaching tide of rationalism. The ideas of the early 
 Church were moulded in an entirely different school from 
 that of religious symbolism. The Jewish synagogue 
 was only the Greek school of philosophy transformed 
 and elevated. It was more Greek than Oriental in its 
 root idea, which was instruction in righteousness by 
 reading and exposition of the law and the prophets. 
 Naturally, therefore, when the synagogue became a 
 Christian Church, it reverted back at once to its elemen- 
 tary form. The school of one Tyrannus, in which Paul 
 taught at Ephesus, could easily become a place of 
 prayer and assembly for early believers. It needed no 
 furniture or appliances to adapt it to the purposes of 
 the new worship. One simple ceremony, the weekly 
 breaking of bread by believers round a table, was all 
 that marked Christianity as a new religion in the ex- 
 ternal sense of the word. But this weekly breaking of 
 bread on the Lord's-day was not a strange and 
 unfamiliar ceremony to the Gentile convert, if he 
 happened to be one of Greek origin and familiar with 
 Republican ideas of social life. There was the
 
 1 6 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 or public meal, to which each member brought his con- 
 tribution of food in a sportula or basket. This was one 
 of the ties which helped to bind political life together 
 in Greece. What more natural, therefore, than that it 
 should be taken up into the new religious life of con- 
 verts to Christianity ? There was no solution of 
 continuity thus between the secular and the spiritual. 
 It was only the common meal taken up into a higher 
 region, and given a sacramental or spiritual significance 
 which had its meaning in Christ, the bread of life, the 
 true and only food of the Divine in man. This was 
 the primitive idea of the Communion, which was only 
 obscured in later times when the priestly and sacrificial 
 idea came in from Judaism to blur the simple concep- 
 tion of feeding on Christ, which the early Christians 
 wished to set forth by this ceremony of breaking of 
 bread. 
 
 To draw, then, these remarks to a conclusion, the 
 earliest type of the Christian Church was that of the 
 synagogue. Passing over into Greece, Christianity easily 
 accommodated itself there to the Republican type of 
 life. The simple worship and the common meal, the 
 principle of local self-government, and the election of 
 their own church officers by the whole congregation 
 these popular principles prevailed universally for a cen- 
 tury or two, and only gave way at last to the Roman 
 idea of an imperium in Church as well as in State. 
 Long before Constantine had begun the subjection of 
 the spiritual to the temporal, the way for that subjection 
 had been prepared by setting up a hierarchy. If the 
 Papacy was " the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting 
 crowned upon its grave," as Hobbes described it, the
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 17 
 
 Episcopal ideas of Cyprian were anticipations of im- 
 perialism, as the Papacy was its afterthought Byzan- 
 tinism, or the entire subjection of the spiritual to the 
 secular, would have been impossible if the worldly spirit 
 of domination had not first invaded the Church. By 
 lording it over God's heritage, bishops prepared the way 
 for their own subjection to Caesar. Thus it is that 
 Caesarism and Clericalism are inextricably mixed up 
 together. By a fatal necessity, or rather, we should say, 
 by a Providential arrangement, which calls out one form 
 of corruption to check another, State interference in 
 religion and a selfish grasping at power on the part of 
 the ministers of religion go together. The remedy 
 against the one is a reform of the other. To disestablish 
 a Church which is hierarchically organised and endowed 
 without at the same time disendowing it, would be to- 
 do a wrong to the lay members. It would be to take 
 away the restraining power of the State, and leave the 
 laity, as in Belgium, and to some extent in Italy, at the 
 mercy of a sacerdotal caste. No State should expose 
 any of its subjects to such a trial as this. Mr. Gladstone 
 has justly remarked, in a recent article on " Italy and 
 her Church," that the Italian Government made a 
 serious mistake in surrendering the Exequatur and the 
 Placet, and that in abandoning these rights the State 
 committed a breach of trust as well as an act of folly. 
 He illustrates this distinction by reference to the Irish 
 Church Act. Before disestablishment the Irish bishops 
 were appointed by the Crown, and when this right was 
 surrendered, Parliament took care that the laity pre- 
 viously represented by the Crown should continue to be 
 represented by a lay element in the Synod of the dis- 
 
 2
 
 1 8 The Church as it was Intended to be. 
 
 established Church. In Italy, on the other hand, the 
 patronage of the Crown has been handed over to the 
 ecclesiastical authorities, without any reservation what- 
 ever on behalf of the people for whom the Crown held 
 this patronage on trust. Cavour's maxim, therefore, of a 
 free Church in a free State, has resulted in an imperium 
 in imperio, which is always contrary to true policy. If 
 Italy has not been torn in two owing to the machina- 
 tions of the Ultramontane party acting without check 
 or sense of responsibility on the parochial clergy, it has 
 not been for want of will to work mischief on their part, 
 or from the wisdom of politicians in warding off the 
 consequences of their own mistake, but solely owing to 
 that wonderful good fortune of Italy by which the very 
 stars in their courses seem to have fought on her side. 
 She has been shielded from the consequences of her 
 own impolicy by her alliance with Germany, and by the 
 inability of the Ultramontane party to strike her down 
 by the aid of France. But it is none the less certain 
 that it was a mistake to leave clericalism to work 
 without the check of Caesarism. If the restraining hand 
 of the State were taken off, then the clerical power 
 should have been reduced still further by disendowing 
 the clergy and calling in the action of the laity. To 
 some extent this is the case. The patronage of many 
 parishes rests with the people ; but this is far less the 
 case than in Switzerland, and even in Germany, and to 
 this extent the Church of Rome is more powerful than 
 ever in Italy. 
 
 These considerations show us that the separation of 
 Church and State is not to be effected without some 
 regard to the order in which that connection grew up,
 
 The Church as it was Intended to be. 19 
 
 or to the corruptions of the Church which almost neces- 
 sitated this alliance. We shall return to this sub- 
 ject in a subsequent chapter. It is enough here 
 to remark that the history of the Church is the best 
 comment on its present condition. It could never have 
 fallen into its present condition of bondage if it had 
 kept itself pure from the taint of sacerdotalism and the 
 organisation which this implies. But as soon as a pro- 
 fessional priesthood arose, and this class began to 
 grasp at exclusive power in the Church, it entered on 
 a region in which it had to deal with the State first as 
 an enemy, then as a rival, and, lastly, as an ally and 
 partner in the spoil. In the long list of the captives 
 found in the mystic Babylon at her overthrow, there 
 is the " souls of men." We may take this, without any 
 stretch of fancy, to refer to that slavery, political and 
 religious, which a corrupt Church and a corrupt Empire 
 together helped to rivet, and which has come down to 
 us through the Middle Ages as a dark legacy from the 
 evil times of the old Roman world. 
 
 2 2
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MYTH- MAKING AGE OF CHURCH 
 HISTORY. 
 
 MYTH and legend have been distinguished in this way 
 that myth is an idea realised, while a legend is a fact 
 idealised. The one enters the region of fiction at the 
 point where the other leaves it. Where the one begins 
 the other ends. Around a kernel of truth in both cases, 
 a pulpy mass of fiction grows by accretion, the only 
 difference being, that the truth in the one case is lodged 
 in a fact, in the other in an idea. The true fact as a 
 legend is projected into the world of idea ; the true idea 
 as a myth is projected into the world of fact. It is 
 needless here to adduce instances of both ; all we would 
 remark is, that the legend-making and mythical spirit, 
 as they are both departures from truth, invariably go 
 together. Fabulous versions of fact, and fabulous dis- 
 tortions of ideas, are inseparable. Without some 
 mythical spirit, or the idea of truth gone astray, legends 
 would never grow up ; so, on the other hand, without 
 some love of legendary exaggeration of fact, myths, 
 or the floating mist of ideas, would never condense in 
 showers of sentiment. 
 
 In the case of the growth of sacerdotal pretensions, 
 we see the action of both myth and legend. Mere
 
 The Myth-Making Age of Church History. 21 
 
 legends by themselves would not have produced these 
 corruptions, since facts, however exaggerated, are still 
 facts. The legend of the thundering legion, or of the 
 martyrs who spoke after their tongues were cut out, are 
 only exaggerations, or mere misinterpretations of fact, 
 the mischief of which is comparatively small. There is 
 a foundation of fact for the legend ; and when we get 
 at the original tale in its true dimensions, we not only 
 understand it better, but also can allow for the mistake 
 of those well-meaning persons who think to heighten 
 our wonder by piling on additions to the facts of the 
 case. But the action of a myth or a distorted idea is 
 more subtle and far more dangerous than that of a 
 legend or exaggerated fact. A mythical idea works 
 like a poison in the body which it enters. It in- 
 sinuates itself through and through ; it corrupts and 
 depraves the inner sense of truth ; and then at last it 
 breaks out in those lying wonders which we know eccle- 
 siastical miracles to be. Without myths there could be 
 no legends ; without lying ideas there would be no 
 lying facts. Critics of ecclesiastical miracles begin at 
 the wrong end, in dealing out judgment without mercy 
 on monkish miracles, often repeated in a childish good 
 faith, while they spare the mythical spirit which created 
 the church system, at the base of which these legends 
 sprang up, as mushrooms around a decaying oak. 
 
 Let us deal, then, with these two evils in the right 
 order. Let us begin by laying the axe at the root of 
 the tree of sacerdotalism. Half reformers of the 
 Anglican persuasion would cut away some of the 
 monstrosities of modern Romanism, and relegate the 
 ecclesiastical miracles quietly to the dim twilight of
 
 22 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 the pre-scientific age when they arose. But this is not 
 enough. Church principles are themselves at fault A 
 distorted and unapostolic myth of the Church as an 
 external organised corporation, having a hierarchical 
 succession of orders from the apostles' days, lies at the 
 root of all legends of monkish miracles. Ecclesiastical 
 miracles stand or fall, as those of the New Testament 
 itself do, with our ideas of the authority of those who 
 wrought them. The credibility of any miracle as a bare 
 fact is not enough ; it must be taken, as all candid 
 apologists admit, with the institution of which it is a 
 part. Jn this sense miracles are rational or not, if con- 
 sistent with the principle of the institution which 
 vouches for them. Miracles of mercy are rational, for 
 instance, in the case of Christ ; but a miracle of pure 
 evil, a mere wonder, would be a case of Satan casting 
 out Satan. This is the true rationale of miracles. If 
 Christ is a myth, then His miracles are legends ; and so 
 the school of unbelief in Germany, which began with 
 treating the miracles as legends, went on quite con- 
 sistently to regard the life of the Christ Himself as a 
 myth. 
 
 We must deal in the same way with ecclesiastical 
 miracles. Either ecclesiastical ideas are true, and then 
 ecclesiastical miracles are also credible ; or, on the other 
 hand, the ecclesiastical idea is itself a myth, and then 
 these miracles grew out of it in the way that legends 
 grew up in classical Rome. In Livy's pictured page we 
 see exactly how the process went on with pagan Rome, 
 and in Church history how it repeated itself in Christian 
 Rome. The myth, or after-thought of Roman greatness,, 
 suggested the necessity for these portents and prodigies^
 
 Of Church History. 23 
 
 which thicken the farther back we go in the annals of 
 Rome. Childish as these legends mostly are, they 
 would never have been heard of unless the success of 
 Rome as the one conquering city had excited a craving 
 for annals corresponding to the illustrious deeds of 
 Rome in her after-history. The same case as this is of 
 every-day occurrence among ourselves. A man springs 
 from obscurity and achieves fame, and the Heralds' 
 College is ready to find a coat of arms and bio- 
 graphers to invent a pedigree for him. Nothing makes 
 success of this kind like success, and the history of 
 Rome, pagan and Christian, is alike a comment on this 
 sarcasm. The legends of Livy and the annals of 
 Baronius are parallel histories. In both cases the myth 
 of Roman greatness itself, the after-thought of history, 
 suggested the legends of early and later times. 
 
 Let us deal with the myth first. The idea of Roman 
 supremacy and of a centralised system of Church 
 government grew up early ; we cannot say how soon. 
 The generation after the apostles knew nothing of it, 
 for we have fortunately one genuine document a 
 letter of the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth, 
 which goes by the name of the Epistle of Clement. 
 The remarkable fact is, that the name of Clement, its 
 reputed author, never once appears in the letter from 
 beginning to end, although later authorities, Clement of 
 Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius, all ascribe it un- 
 hesitatingly to Clement of Rome. Now here we trace 
 the myth to its very nidus. A congregation of believers 
 " sojourning in Rome," address their fellow-believers in 
 Corinth on a matter of order on which they are ap- 
 pealed to. The same contentious and carnal mind
 
 24 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 which the Apostle Paul rebuked in the Corinthians is 
 still at work there. But how is it met and dealt with ? 
 Not by authority. The apostle claimed authority, and 
 threatened to come to them " with a rod " ; and in one 
 place commanded them by his spirit, as if he were 
 present among them, to cut off the incestuous person.* 
 Does Clement, the so-called successor of the apostles, 
 claim any of the apostles' authority ? His name does 
 not appear on the letter. From aught we should know 
 from internal evidence, he may have had nothing to say 
 to the letter at all. At the same time, we have 
 no reason to reject the external testimony which 
 ascribes it to him. On the contrary, we hold it as a 
 decisive, because undesigned, testimony as to the 
 mythical growth of the whole episcopal theory which 
 culminates in the Papacy. The after-thought of such 
 men as Origen and Eusebius, judging the first century 
 by the third and fourth, was very naturally this : that a 
 letter from Rome could only come under the bulla or 
 seal of its bishop. True, the bull is wanting, but then 
 it must be put to it, so the myth thus grew that a letter 
 from the Church of Rome could only be considered as 
 an epistle from Clement, the reputed Bishop of Rome. 
 Under modern criticism the myth disappears, and melts 
 into thin air ; but early ages were not critical, and so 
 one myth brought in another, until the whole sky was 
 darkened with the mists of Church authority, and it fell, 
 at last, in the thick rain of the superstition of the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 One myth, as we have seen, led to another. The 
 
 * Vide Hilgenfeld's " Novum Testamentum extra Canonem receptum." 
 Prolegomena to St. Clement, p. xxii.
 
 Of Church History. 25 
 
 myth of bishops (now elevated above presbyters as a 
 distinct order) ruling over churches suggested that other 
 myth that the greater churches, the patriarchal churches 
 of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus, were all, 
 like that of Jerusalem, planted by apostles. The 
 greater the Church, the greater the necessity for tracing 
 its rise up to some apostolic founder. Rome, the 
 greatest of all, must have two apostles for its founders ; 
 it must rear its head above other churches, and " securus 
 judicat orbem" on the foundations of both Peter and 
 Paul, the apostles of the circumcision and of the uncir- 
 cumcision. What if the evidence that Peter ever 
 visited Rome at all was hazy in the extreme, and at 
 best more than doubtful ? No matter ; the mythical 
 spirit comes in to eke out the legendary love of exag- 
 geration. " Possunt quia posse videntur " is the explana- 
 tion of cases like these. They are probable, because 
 possible, and possible, because highly convenient for 
 those whose pretensions to supremacy they are thus 
 brought in to prop up. This underpinning of old 
 ecclesiastical buildings was known to the Church 
 school of divines long before it was attempted by 
 Church architects. The latter are only copyists of the 
 former. So deftly have they done their work, that it 
 has taken centuries of criticism to take down the sub- 
 structure of myth and fable on which the Papal 
 supremacy rests. Even before the Reformation, Lau- 
 rentius Valla saw that the Donation of Constantine 
 was a fiction, and that the Decretals, as they were 
 called, of the early Popes were forgeries. The tem- 
 poral power rested on the one, the spiritual on the 
 other; and yet, though the Donation of Constantine
 
 26 The Myth- Making Age 
 
 has long since been treated as a clumsy forgery, the 
 claim to temporal power has only been renounced 
 when wrenched from the hands of those who claimed it. 
 In the same way the spiritual supremacy, resting on 
 certain Decretals forged by the monk Isidore, of Sevile, 
 has passed out of count on both sides ; and the 
 chronicle which contains these Decretals is a literary 
 rarity. Still, the pretensions which they support have 
 not been abandoned. When the foundations are taken 
 away, the building still keeps up. The ignorant 
 credulity of one class, and the interested assumptions 
 of another, are enough, between them, to keep up an 
 ecclesiastical edifice a long time after its foundations 
 have been undermined. 
 
 It is necessary to understand this myth-making 
 temper, or else we shall fail to understand the Middle 
 Ages. It accounts for the steady growth of Church prin- 
 ciples during the eighteen centuries from the apostles' 
 days to our own. As soon as the primitive idea of the 
 Church as a voluntary society was lost, or replaced, as 
 it tacitly was, no one can tell how, why, or when, by 
 the governmental, all flowed from this by a necessary 
 law of development. The Church, which was meant to 
 grow by one law, viz., that of assimilation, soon began 
 to grow by another, viz., that of accretion. The trans- 
 formation began in very early times too far back for 
 criticism to trace. All that we can say is, that in 
 Clement's time it had not begun, and that by Cyprian's 
 time it was in full force. It was a case like that of 
 petrefaction, in which a log of wood placed under a 
 dripping well is changed particle by particle. The 
 stalactites thus assume the grain and fibre of the wood,
 
 Of Church History. 27 
 
 so that it is not for some time suspected that timber has 
 been changed into stone. This is the only account we 
 can give of the contrast between the New Testament 
 idea of the Church and that which meets us in divines 
 of the Anglican and Roman school of theology. 
 Between these latter, the difference is one not so much 
 of principle as of detail. Both hold to the external 
 and governmental idea of the Church, and whether the 
 process is to stop at the supremacy of bishops or of me- 
 tropolitans, of patriarchs or of popes, is a matter of detail 
 on which none but trained theologians care to dispute. 
 It may be that the Anglican has the better of the con- 
 troversy in overthrowing the supremacy of the Pope. 
 But the Papal party, in return, can make short work of 
 the fiction of patriarchal supremacy or episcopal auto- 
 nomy. The truth is, that as the Church grew she 
 organised herself for the better, as they say for the 
 worse, as we contend. The result of this organisation 
 was, that the Church became a corporation, and as such 
 a centre of power, with which the State could treat on 
 more or less equal terms. Hence all theories of the 
 alliance of Church and State rest on this assumption, 
 that the Church is an organised society ; and without 
 organisation, or that reduced to a minimum, the alliance 
 theory is out of the question. We thus come back to 
 the point from which we set out, that Caesarism and 
 clericalism are inseparable, and are both permitted of 
 God, the one to check and restrain the other. To argue 
 the question of Establishments and State Churches on 
 the narrow ground either that we find them in the Old 
 Testament, or do not find them in the New, is to betray 
 a shallow view of the problems of life, of which each
 
 28 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 person is called to give some practical solution. The 
 roots of the controversy lie deep down in the spiritual 
 experience of each individual Christian. Those who 
 have not broken the shell of their Judaism, which is 
 applicable to nominal Protestants as to others, can 
 know of no other protection for their spiritual life than 
 an external organised society. This once conceded, 
 the rest follows with inexorable logic. Given the 
 Church as an organised corporation, having a succession 
 of office-bearers from the apostles, and holding property 
 in trust for ecclesiastical uses, it is only a question of 
 time when a Constantine shall knock at the door of 
 that Church and ask admission at first as a proselyte, 
 then as its patron and summits episcopus. We have no 
 right to object to the Establishment principle as begun 
 by Constantine, unless we go on to see that the Cleri- 
 calism of Cyprian necessitated the Caesarism of Con- 
 stantine. We cannot stop short in our objections to 
 State Churches at any one stage of the declension of the 
 Church, and say, "Here the apostacy began;" "Here the 
 Church and the world became united and mingled their 
 waters, which up to this time had flowed in separate 
 channels." All reformation to be final must be thorough. 
 If we are to speak of a Church of the future at all, it 
 must be one in which we go back, not to the so-called 
 primitive times of the fourth, or even of the second cen- 
 tury, but we must go up at once to the fountain head, 
 and model our churches after societies as simple as that 
 which met in the upper room of Jerusalem, or the house 
 of Crispus and Gaius at Corinth. How it will fare with 
 Anglicanism, or Presbyterianism, or even some types of 
 organised Independency, it is impossible to say. It is,
 
 Of Church History. 29 
 
 probably, this fear of an unorganised Christianity, a 
 mere " century of sects," as men said in Milton's days, 
 which attracts so many to the opposite or governmental 
 principle, the only legitimate outcome of which is a 
 spiritual despotism like that of Rome. Our protests 
 against sacerdotalism are unmeaning unless they mount 
 up to the origin of all sacerdotalism. As soon as the 
 principle is conceded that church officers of any kind 
 may have dominion over our faith, there is no point at 
 which we may pause in the fatal descent. Historically, 
 as we have seen, prelacy soon developed into the 
 patriarchate, and that into the Papacy, and it is vain to 
 say, as the Anglicans do, that we may take our stand at 
 the transition point where the first stage passed into the 
 second, or the second into the third. All is orderly and 
 continuous, and the assumption of Papal supremacy is 
 quite as legitimate as that of the patriarchal, and the 
 patriarchal as that of episcopal prelacy. Obsta principiis 
 is the only safe motto in cases of this kind. It is the 
 first step which commits us to the second, and the 
 second to the third. 
 
 The defenders of prelacy have put forward this 
 apology for it, that it was the front which an organised 
 Church body presented to the Gnostic and other here- 
 sies of the second and third century which saved the 
 Church. But for the unity of action, as they tell us, of a 
 synodically governed Church, Christianity would have 
 perished under its own dissensions. We are not insen- 
 sible to the force of this argument. If there had been 
 no internal necessity for it growing out of the corrup- 
 tions of the times, we do not suppose that any body of 
 Christians would have ever consented to submit to a
 
 30 Tfie Myth-Making Age 
 
 centralised authority. The genius of Christianity is so 
 clearly Republican, that it must have been under the 
 pressure of some overwhelming sense of danger that the 
 Church ever submitted to a spiritual despotism. But 
 this argument either proves nothing, or it proves too 
 much. It is only an apology for episcopacy, and tells 
 us nothing more than this, that in the moral govern- 
 ment of the world one evil is raised up to counteract 
 another. In this sense it proves too little, or it proves 
 too much, for it implies that such was the anarchy of 
 the primitive Church, that nothing but spiritual despot- 
 ism could be devised to counteract it. It is an apology 
 for episcopacy like that of French Imperialists for the 
 revival of the Empire. So great was the dread of 
 Socialism, that society called out for a Saviour, and 
 what it sought for, it found in the sham Caesar of the 
 Tuileries. The truth is, in both cases, that men made 
 an excuse of their selfish fears. Caesarism, whether in 
 Church or State, was a short cut out of difficulties which 
 they had not the manliness to fight with the fair 
 weapons of controversy and argument. Necessity is 
 the tyrant's plea, and authority is the coward's plea ; but, 
 like all acts of cowardice, it recoils on those who are 
 guilty of it. As a result of this submission to spiritual 
 despotism, they obtained a momentary lull from contro- 
 versy, but at what a price. Differences composed in 
 this way by conciliar authority were not set at rest, but 
 only put off to a more convenient season. Each dis- 
 pute composed in this way only broke out afresh. We 
 see it in the history of the Arian, Eutychian, and 
 Nestorian controversies. From the fourth to the 
 seventh centuries the Eastern Church was distracted
 
 Of Church History. 31 
 
 with controversies as to the person of Christ, and as 
 soon as the Church had pulled up one bundle of tares, 
 another had sprung up to choke the wheat. The mis- 
 fortune, too, was that in rooting up the tares they 
 plucked up the wheat also. The condition of Eastern 
 Christianity at last became so corrupt and powerless, 
 that it had lost all internal energy. The canker of 
 Byzantine Caesarism had eaten into its very vitals. The 
 Church became the tool of the State in carrying out 
 its despotic restraint of all liberty of thought and action, 
 and when the time had arrived, both perished together, 
 not long after the rise of the Saracen power. 
 
 The state of things was only a degree better in the 
 West. Here, at least, the Prankish Empire was raised 
 up to put some slight restraint on sacerdotalism, and to 
 allow some little liberty of independence of thought. 
 The Byzantine Caesarism which first patronised the 
 Church, and then extinguished it and crushed its in- 
 dividuality, was checked by this providential circum- 
 stance, that the Popes, in order to protect themselves 
 against the incursions, first of L the Byzantine Caesar 
 and afterwards of the Lombards, appealed for help to 
 the Franks. That help was willingly given, and the 
 Pope, in gratitude, crowned Charlemagne, on Christmas 
 Day, 800, as Caesar Augustus and Imperator of the 
 West On this day, on which, as historians have re- 
 marked, ancient history ended and modern begins, a 
 rivalry was set up between Pope and Emperor; and 
 it is to this rivalry of their successors, which neither 
 Charlemagne nor Leo III. could foresee, that Western 
 Europe owes her liberties. Any advantage which the 
 West has over the East arises from the happy circum-
 
 32 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 stance that Caesarism and Clericalism were not cen- 
 tralised, as at Constantinople. In Byzantine Chris- 
 tianity the Patriarch became the tool of the Caesar, 
 and so both perished together. In the West, on the 
 other hand, Pope and Kaiser struggled together for 
 supremacy during long centuries, and it was out of 
 this struggle that our liberties, civil and religious, have 
 grown. Sometimes, as in the case of Frederick II., 
 resistance to Papal supremacy took the extreme form 
 of a rejection of the religion whose chief ministers set 
 themselves above the civil power ; but Frederick was an 
 exceptional character. He was a Voltairean king, of 
 the type of Frederick of Prussia, five centuries before 
 his time. But, in the majority of cases, the dispute 
 was carried on within closed lists. Pope and Emperor 
 tilted against each other on this single question of 
 the supremacy. In fact, the contention turned, as we 
 see in Dante's treatise, " De Monarchia" as to which 
 of the two lights, the Pope or the Emperor, was the 
 greater ; which was to rule the day and which the 
 night. Dante discusses the question in the spirit of the 
 scholastic philosophy, and chops a good deal of strange 
 logic in support of his proposition that Rome is the 
 legitimate mistress of the world, and the Emperor not 
 the Pope the legitimate lord of Rome. Assuming that 
 the world is a Monarchy, and ought to be subject to 
 one master, he disposes of the claim of the Pope to 
 be that master : " God's vicar or minister, by whom I 
 mean the successor of Peter, is, in truth, the keeper 
 of the keys of the celestial realm." He sets forth and 
 assigns to each of these two powers their place. Man 
 being dual, he is subject to two orders, temporal and
 
 Of Church History. 33 
 
 spiritual, the Empire and the Papacy ; he is fitted for 
 two forms of beatitude earthly and heavenly to which 
 the cardinal and theological virtues severally lead him. 
 God alone is above the two chief rulers of mankind. 
 Pope and Emperor alike take their authority from Him, 
 nor is either subject to the other. Their spheres are 
 essentially different. In like manner the sun and moon 
 rule the sky, and are distinct. The only question, then, 
 that arose was this, Which of the two was the greater 
 light ? The sentence of Innocent IV. is well known 
 that as the moon receives her light from the more bril- 
 liant star, so kings reign by the chief of the Church, 
 who comes from God. Dante, as a Ghibelline, decides 
 otherwise. Rome, he says, should have two suns to 
 point out the two ways to God and the world. 
 
 " Duo soli aver che 1'una, e 1'altra stracla, 
 
 Facean vedere, e del mondo e di Dio." Purg. xvi. 1 06. 
 
 He compares the Pope to the camel which is unclean, 
 because "while it can ruminate it does not divide the 
 hoof ; " whereas in the case of the Pope, " the sword is 
 joined to the crozier, and ill beseemeth it that by main 
 force one with the other go."* In the anarchy of the 
 Middle Ages Dante saw no safety for society but in 
 a return to the centralised monarchy of the early 
 Roman Empire. His theory was the old urbis- et orbis, 
 modified by Christianity. He would set up a system 
 of checks by which the civil and the spiritual both 
 claiming a certain supremacy, and both deriving their 
 authority from God should make a united Christendom 
 
 * For fuller illustration of Dante's views on Church and State, 
 see the " Introduction to the Study of Dante," by John Aldington 
 Symonds. 
 
 3
 
 34 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 out of the distracted mass of petty princes and im- 
 perial free cities, which waged continual war on each 
 other. 
 
 Whether Dante's ideal of a centralised Monarchy for 
 Europe, in which Pope and Emperor held alternate and 
 divided sway, was only a dream or not, it is at least 
 a fact that neither Pope nor Emperor succeeded in 
 wresting the supremacy from each other. Under 
 Gregory IX. and Frederick II. the conflict came to a 
 head, and both combatants left off as they began, 
 broken and exhausted, but unable to crush the other. 
 Meanwhile, it was out of these disputes that the liberties 
 of modern Europe arose. Nothing is so sophistical as 
 the attempt of modern Ultramontanes to show that the 
 Popes were often the champions of popular liberties. 
 It happened so ; but this arose from the necessities of 
 the case. In King John's case the legate and arch- 
 bishop side with the people, and wring from the King 
 the Great Charter which he signed at Runnymede ; 
 but at the Constitutions of Clarendon the struggle is 
 against clerical assumptions, and then the Crown and 
 people combine against the clergy, as in the former case 
 clergy and people combine against the Crown. The 
 real danger to liberty has been when a Byzantine union 
 of civil and ecclesiastical power has occurred, as was 
 more or less the case in almost every country after the 
 Reformation, and down to the time of the French 
 Revolution. It may be said that popular liberty had 
 never fallen so low as in France under the centralised 
 despotism of Louis XIV., when Church and State were 
 one machine, moved at the will of one man. In this 
 respect the rise of modern Ultramontanism is by no
 
 Of Church History. 35 
 
 means an unmixed evil. It is a question whether the 
 so-called Gallican liberties were not more inimical to 
 real liberty than the wildest assertion of Papal supre- 
 macy as made by the Jesuits. On the other hand, as is 
 well known, the Jesuits actually favoured liberty as a 
 check and set-off to the absolutism of kings. Thus it 
 is that, as during the Middle Ages the contentions of 
 Popes and Emperors in some sense neutralised each 
 other and favoured the growth of popular liberty, so 
 under the centralised bureaucratic systems of modern 
 Europe the resistance of Ultramontanism is a useful 
 check. Neither priests nor kings can be regarded 
 as safe guardians of the liberties of the people ; but 
 when they fall out, as they often do, it happens, as in the 
 proverb that honest men come by their own. Caesarism 
 and Clericalism are, and always must be, the foes of 
 liberty. Caesarism is the negation of civil, as Cleri- 
 calism of religious, liberty. They are often allied, and 
 their alliance, as was seen in the case of Alva and the 
 Jesuits in the Netherlands, is the deathblow to all 
 liberty. Happily, however, their interests sometimes 
 clash, and then we see the unnatural result of the 
 Jesuits extolling regicide, and actually applauding de- 
 mocracy ; on the other hand, we have anointed kings, 
 like Frederick of Prussia and Joseph of Austria, turned 
 Voltaireans, and striking at the principle of authority in 
 religion without considering that they are actually 
 undermining thereby their own power. In the moral 
 government of the world it thus comes about that one 
 evil is permitted, or even raised up, to check another. 
 Priestcraft and kingcraft combined form the most 
 intolerable form of misgovernment under which man- 
 
 32
 
 36 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 kind can groan. Such was Byzantinism as it existed 
 for centuries in the Lower Empire, and such was the 
 system which Laud, Strafford, and Charles attempted to 
 set up in this country. Happily for England, they 
 signally failed, and all three conspirators paid the 
 forfeit with their lives. It succeeded, unhappily for 
 her, only too well in France, and the penalty she 
 paid for submitting to the Oriental despotism of 
 Louis XIV. was a century of degradation, followed by 
 the upheaval of the Revolution, from the effects of 
 which she is still suffering. The lessons of history, 
 then, are so plain that he who runs may read. Christ 
 came to give deliverance to the captive ; but when His 
 Church becomes a spiritual despotism, she naturally 
 allied herself with the powers of this world. By a kind 
 of fellow-feeling, she assimilated her system to that of 
 the Imperial power. She courts its alliance, and lends 
 and gives support to its system of authority, and to 
 the general repression of free inquiry in all matters, tem- 
 poral and religious. By this degrading alliance she has 
 signed her own death-warrant. She would perish in 
 her own corruption but for reforms from within, which 
 ultimately take the shape of revolts from the principle 
 of authority altogether, and the assertion of the counter- 
 principle of the supremacy of conscience, and the duty 
 of men to prove all things and to hold fast that which is 
 good. This is the stage in our religious progress which 
 we have reached at present. The Reformation, which 
 does not go on to assert the ultimate principle of Pro- 
 testantism, is doomed beforehand to defeat. It may 
 exist on sufferance as modern Anglicanism ; but it is 
 pressed in on both sides by two opposite principles
 
 Of Church History. 37 
 
 that of authority or of private judgment, to one of 
 which it must ultimately surrender at discretion. It 
 may boast for a time that it has struck out the golden 
 mean between too great stiffness in refusing and too 
 great facility in yielding. But this golden mean turns 
 out, on examination, to be only a leaden mediocrity, as 
 Archbishop Parker describes it in one of his Zurich 
 letters to Bullinger. There is no satisfactory Reforma- 
 tion which does not bring us back to the ultimate prin- 
 ciple on which Christianity rests. If it is a spiritual 
 religion appealing to the enlightened conscience, and 
 resting for its evidence on the personal experience of 
 those who have tasted that the Lord is gracious, then 
 we do not see how we can get beyond the sect principle 
 in religion. Christ's people are as strangers and pil- 
 grims ; they hold the truth in a mystery ; the world, as 
 it knew not their Master, so it will not know them. 
 They are, and must continue, a sect everywhere spoken 
 against. If, on the other hand, their religion is one of 
 dogma and definition, to be taught by an order of 
 trained clerics, then at once the door is open for the 
 principle of authority, and, where authority enters in, it 
 is impossible to draw the line and say it must stop here 
 or there. A dogmatic theology involves, from the 
 nature of the case, a hierarchy to define and sustain it ; 
 and this leads us on to the subjection of that hierarchy 
 to some power greater than itself, and whose springs of 
 action the world understands. The supremacy of the 
 civil power is one of the first necessities of modern 
 civilisation ; hence, to escape from the civil supremacy, 
 a Church must go back behind the Middle Ages, when 
 the Papacy first advanced its pretensions ; behind even
 
 38 The Myth-Making Age 
 
 those primitive times of the fourth century, when 
 Church and State were co-ordinate powers. We must 
 get up to the age when the Church met in the upper 
 room, and when Paul preached in his own hired house, 
 no man forbidding him. 
 
 Thus, the only road to a reformation in church 
 matters lies in a return to primitive simplicity. We 
 have to pierce through the cloudy myth and legend 
 out of which so-called church principles arose. It is 
 the method of authority in matters of religion in other 
 words, the dogmatic principle which brings in its train, 
 by an inexorable necessity, both endowment and estab- 
 lishment ; the endowment of Clericalism and the estab- 
 lishment of Caesarism. There is only one remedy 
 against these evils, which is a return to Republican 
 simplicity. Hence it is that they are only half con- 
 sistent who ask for the separation of Church and State, 
 and would leave the Church under the rule of an auto- 
 cratic and dogmatic hierarchy. Synods, and the repre- 
 sentation of the laity, may be some sort of safeguard, 
 as in Ireland ; but the true safeguard is the Congre- 
 gational principle that each body of believers holds, 
 direct from Christ, the head of the Church, not 
 mediately from some synod or central conference. 
 We shall see in the next chapter that all attempts 
 to break out from these Caudine Forks of Caesarism 
 and Clericalism have failed. The Church has been 
 destined to march underneath them, in order to teach 
 her the original mistake which she made, and to 
 point out to her that she yielded exactly where her 
 Divine Master stood firm. She accepted endowment 
 in other words, she yielded to the first temptation of
 
 Of Church History. 39 
 
 commanding these stones to become bread ; she ac- 
 cepted establishment, in bowing down to the ruler of 
 this world in return for temporal power ; and, lastly, 
 she committed the crowning act of impiety in the 
 Papacy, casting herself from the pinnacle of the temple, 
 as it were, and claiming special protection from the 
 angels so as not to dash her foot against a stone.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE THREE TEMPTATIONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 THE three temptations of Christ at the opening of His 
 ministry the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and 
 the pride of life seem to suggest the three stages 
 through which the Church has declined from the stan- 
 dard of primitive purity. She has been tempted in the 
 same way as her Divine Master was through appetite, 
 through ambition, and through spiritual pride and pre- 
 sumption. Alas ! unlike Him, she has yielded to these 
 three forms of temptation. Where He stood, there she 
 has fallen, and in each case her yielding to one form of 
 temptation has only laid her open and exposed to a 
 fresh assault of Satan. Not to press the comparison 
 too far, we may describe the stages of her decline and 
 fall as follows : The first corruption of Christianity 
 was the lust of the flesh. Led into the wilderness of 
 persecution, she was there an hungered of the good 
 things of this world. The lesson which she was placed 
 there to learn was that of entire dependence on God 
 that man does not live by bread alone, but by every 
 word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God doth 
 man live. Dependence was the law of her being ; but,, 
 instead of that, she lusted after endowments and 
 emoluments, and what she longed for she was given, even.
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 41 
 
 as the Israelites were given meat for their lust in the 
 wilderness. An organised hierarchy and a settled pro- 
 vision for their maintenance, other than the freewill 
 offerings which came in day by day this was the first 
 temptation which assailed the Church. It was when 
 she yielded to this that Christ's religion developed 
 externally into a cult, and internally into a dogma, 
 requiring in both cases a trained professional class to 
 perform its ceremonials, and to unfold and maintain its 
 dogmas. Having yielded to this form of temptation, 
 organisation having prepared the way for endowments, 
 and made them in a sense necessary, the Church was 
 prepared to listen to a second suggestion of the 
 tempter. Taken up into an exceeding high mountain, 
 she was shown the kingdoms of this world and their 
 glory. The cross in the air, it is said, converted Con- 
 stantine, and the politic Caesar made a convenient 
 profession of the new religion, the symbol of which he 
 set up as his labarum, or standard. But Constantine 
 would never have discerned this sign in the skies, unless 
 he had first perceived that there was something in the 
 Christianity of his day which he could mould to his 
 purpose and shape to his will as a political instrument. 
 The kingdoms of this world were offered to the Church, 
 as they were to her Divine Master ; but, unlike Him, 
 she had neither the faith to wait on the Divine will 
 nor the spiritual discernment to see that these gifts of 
 worldly grandeur were only Dead Sea fruits, which 
 would turn to ashes on her lips. Having thus made 
 her first descent from primitive purity, she had now to 
 undergo a second transformation. From a spiritual 
 commonwealth as a kingdom of priests, she had de-
 
 42 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 scended to adopt the Judaical idea of a sacrificing and 
 sacerdotal caste, separate from the laity ; and now this 
 caste is ready to be taken over and salaried by the 
 State. They are to become Caesar's servants, and do 
 his bidding. Caesarism, or the second stage of the 
 apostacy, would have been impossible unless she had 
 first yielded to clericalism. As it was, the development, 
 or downward descent, as we hold it to be, was inevit- 
 able. Launched on a career of worldly aggrandise- 
 ment, she passed on by slow but certain stages of 
 growth to the last form of the apostacy, which we may 
 compare to the pinnacle of the temple. This was 
 reached when hierarchy, culminating into Byzantine 
 State Churchmanship, at last put forth the monstrous 
 pretension of a universal bishop, urbis et orbis. It is 
 significant that when John, the Bishop of "New 
 Rome" in A.D. 589, had assumed, in a public docu- 
 ment, the title of " Universal Bishop," it was Gregory 
 the Great, the then Bishop of Old Rome, who withstood 
 him to the face, because he was to be blamed, in the 
 same bold way that one apostle withstood another 
 when guilty of an inconsistency. Writing on this 
 subject to the Emperor, Gregory adds : " I confidently 
 affirm that whosoever calls himself, or desires to be 
 called, Universal Priest, is in his pride going before 
 Antichrist, because through pride he prefers himself to 
 the rest." To his brother patriarchs of Antioch and 
 Alexandria he wrote : " This name ' Universal ' was 
 offered during the Holy Synod of Chalcedon to the 
 Pontiff of the Apostolic See, a post which, by God's 
 Providence, I fill. But no one of my predecessors con- 
 sented to use so profane a term, because, plainly, if a
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 43 
 
 single patriarch is called ' Universal,' the name of 
 patriarch is taken from the rest ; wherefore let your 
 Holiness, in your letters, never call any one ' Universal/ 
 lest in offering undue honour to another, you should 
 deprive yourself of that which is your due." To John, 
 the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had assumed this 
 title, he wrote that " the sole Head of the Universal 
 Church is Christ," and asks him what account he will 
 have to render to God at the last day, if he thus tries 
 to subject to himself as Universal Bishop the members 
 of Christ, all of whom are equal. It was not long before 
 the successors of this Gregory assumed those very- 
 marks of the Antichrist which a Bishop of Rome had 
 denounced as the signs of His coming. Pride, the sin 
 through which the angels fell, was, according to 
 Gregory, the mark of the apostacy. And yet this 
 Bishop of Old Rome, who could see the mote in his 
 episcopal brother's eye, could not discern the beam in 
 his own eye. As early as 606 he had assumed that 
 title himself, and from this date, according to many 
 interpreters of prophecy, began the 1260 years of the 
 wilderness state of the Church. It is unnecessary to state 
 here whether we agree or not with this year-day theory 
 of prophecy, and this marking of distinct dates in the 
 roll of prophecy as it unfolds itself. It is enough here 
 to remark that as pride and presumption was the third 
 and last temptation which Christ resisted, so it was the 
 third and last form of the Church's apostacy. The 
 singular thing is, that those who can see the nature of 
 the apostacy as it culminates in the Papacy, claiming, as 
 Hildebrand and his successors have done, a universal 
 bishopric and supremacy in Church and State, do not
 
 44 The TJiree Temptations of the Church. 
 
 see that this is only the outgrowth of a previous stage 
 of corruption. What is new Pope but old Patriarch 
 writ large ? The Anglo-Catholic as well as the 
 orthodox Greek Church agree in inveighing against the 
 last stage of the development. But they have no right 
 to complain unless they carry their protest one stage 
 further back, and renounce the hierarchical spirit alto- 
 gether. Thus the three stages of decline are those, 
 when, from taking the stones of endowments and digni- 
 ties for bread, the Church began to crave for the king- 
 doms of this world by an alliance with the State, and 
 ended at last in confounding Church and State alike in 
 that " masterpiece of Satan," the one universal monarchy 
 of the Mediaeval Papacy. This is the pinnacle of the 
 temple of pride, the certain mark of the predicted 
 apostacy ; but the apostle reminds us that the prin- 
 ciple was already at work in his day, and actually calls 
 attention to that withholding or hindering power which 
 kept back for a time the full manifestation of the 
 mystery of iniquity. For the first three centuries 
 Caesarism and Clericalism were opposed ; this was the 
 letting power of the Roman Empire allowed by Provi- 
 dence. But as the Empire began to decline, it laid hold 
 of Clericalism to prop itself by, and the alliance of the 
 two was Byzantine Christianity, when the Church was 
 favoured and patronised by the State. The last stage of 
 all "this strange eventful history" was reached when the 
 Empire or civil power, having altogether fallen to pieces 
 in the West, there was room for the manifestation of the 
 mystery of iniquity a Church, that is, which had com- 
 pletely transformed herself into a worldly power, w r hile 
 she laid claim to be a spiritual one; a Church which, in the
 
 TJts Three Temptations of the Church. 45 
 
 apt language of the Apocalypse, had horns like a lamb, 
 and yet spake like a dragon. Popery has been called 
 Satan's masterpiece ; if so, it is because it is such a 
 perfect counterfeit of a holy and pure original. It is a 
 masterpiece of a kind with that of the forger and 
 utterer of base coin. In dealing with it, it is impossible 
 to say whose image and superscription it has, Caesar's 
 or God's. It is neither wholly secular nor wholly spiri- 
 tual : if it were either one or the other, we should know 
 how to deal with it. Hierarchical pride, for instance, is a 
 corruption of a spiritual truth, and Erastianism is an 
 outbreak of the merely secular spirit in religious affairs. 
 We can deal with these. But the Roman or Ultramon- 
 tane spirit, properly so-called, differs from both or, 
 rather, is a combination of both, as Corinthian brass is of 
 various metals melted up together. There is no greater 
 proof of the strong delusion than the fact that an 
 amalgam results utterly unlike any other. But the 
 strangest part of this progressive development of error is 
 that ecclesiastics, as Gregory of Rome in the case 
 of John of Constantinople, can see the error in others, 
 not in themselves. Prelates object to patriarchs, 
 patriarchs to popes. Each strikes at the evil one stage 
 lower down in the scale of development than that which 
 they have descended to. The half-reformed Anglican 
 often leaves nothing to be desired in his zeal against 
 Popery, except the charity and intelligence to see that 
 the beam is in his own eye. 
 
 To deal even-handed justice all round, we are com- 
 pelled to carry the question of State Churches a stage 
 farther back than is generally done. To strike at the 
 principle of an Establishment or State-endowed Church,
 
 46 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 while we leave untouched the underlying evil of the 
 hierarchy, is to do as with Nebuchadnezzar's tree in the 
 vision it is to cut down the trunk, while the roots are 
 left in the ground to be nourished with the dews of 
 heaven, only to grow again as the opportunity comes 
 round. There is a certain solidarity in evil as in good, 
 a fatal consistency with which one development of the 
 apostacy involves another in its train. It is not a bald 
 truism to say that no lie is of the truth. On the con- 
 trary, it suggests the solemn warning that every lie has 
 its antecedent and its consequent. It springs from a 
 previous apostacy : it results in some still deeper form 
 of corruption. We cannot draw the line, as the dog- 
 matic Anglican or the Lutheran would do, at any one 
 century in Church history, and say that up to this stage 
 the Church was pure and primitive, and that after this we 
 may trace the workings of the apostacy. The apostle, in 
 his letter to the Thessalonians, distinctly teaches the 
 contrary, and points out that there was the germ of this 
 principle already working in the Church, there was the 
 apostacy, the well-known and well-defined departure 
 from the truth (the article here is emphatic), which was 
 like the leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees, of which the 
 Lord had already warned His disciples. We are at a 
 loss to identify this in any other way than as the sacer- 
 dotal or hierarchical spirit which began, even in the 
 apostles' days, to lord it over God's heritage, which 
 elevated Church " offices," introduced at first simply for 
 convenience of administration, into "orders," having an 
 indelible character attached to them like the Levitical 
 priesthood. The Church, from a mere assembly of be- 
 lievers, an ecclesia, or body called out from the rest of
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 47 
 
 mankind, and separated in that way for certain func- 
 tions to be discharged for the good of others, grew into 
 an organised body, having a life of its own. The more 
 the Church and the world were contrasted in one sense, 
 the more the dominant military spirit which then held 
 the world together passed into the Church. Perhaps on 
 account of its having to do battle with Caesarism, the 
 Church braced itself up to the conflict by adapting 
 to itself the spirit of military organisation ; Loyola, 
 we know, in passing over from one form of knight- 
 errantry to another, transferred to his new cult 
 and order the military rules and iron discipline 
 which made the Spanish infantry the admiration of 
 Europe in the sixteenth century. These Spanish 
 priests, as the Jesuits were known in Germany 
 and elsewhere, were only Spanish soldiers who ex- 
 changed one cloak for another. It was much the same 
 with the early Church. It is true that there was a 
 primitive age, the age of martyrs, emphatically so-called 
 before martyrdom became the new road to saintship, 
 and before hero-worship had infected the Church with a 
 dangerous form of self-righteousness. It could be said 
 of the first martyrs that they overcame by the blood of 
 the Lamb, and they loved not their lives unto the death. 
 But this age was soon succeeded by the apologetic, 
 and that by the dogmatic or creed-making age. 
 Then it was that the evil which was only a germ before 
 burst out into full luxuriance. With the age of Cyprian 
 the monarchical theory of the Episcopal office began 
 to display itself. After a brief struggle, Episcopacy 
 trampled down Presbyterianism, as Presbyterianism 
 a generation before had got the better of Independency.
 
 48 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 But the law is inexorable that " they who slay by the 
 sword s*hall be slain with the sword, they who lead 
 into captivity shall be led into captivity." The Anglican 
 divine points with undisguised satisfaction to the 
 triumph of Cyprian over the Novatian schism, as it 
 was called. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, not 
 only got the better of Novatus, the* presbyter, in argu- 
 ment, but also deposed him in virtue of his superior 
 Episcopal authority. But the Anglican forgets that it 
 was this Episcopal monarchy which paved the way for 
 patriarchal, and, finally, for papal, absolutism. There 
 is no drawing the line, as Dr. Pusey attempts to do, 
 at some arbitrary point in the fourth century, when 
 prelatical Episcopacy had not yet developed into the 
 papal system. The stages of descent from Republican 
 simplicity are clearly marked out. There was first 
 the Independent form, when each church was a little 
 society or club, having no fixed government at all, but 
 only certain bye-laws or rules, agreed on by all mem- 
 bers, as in any other Greek Club or Hetairia. Then 
 followed the Presbyterian type, when the Churches 
 began to confederate under their Presbyter, or Episcopos 
 for the two terms were then interchangeable, the 
 former referring to person, the latter to the office ; the 
 one derived from the Jewish synagogue, and the other 
 from Greek life. It is at this Presbyterian stage that 
 Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians was written. 
 These Corinthians, with the democratic, insubordinate 
 spirit common to the Greek character, and which the 
 apostle himself had noticed only to reprehend, had 
 deposed from the bishopric some worthy presbyters, 
 who had been appointed by them, or afterwards by
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 49 
 
 other men of good repute, with the consent of the 
 whole Church " men who have blamelessly ministered 
 to the flock of Christ with humility, quietness, and 
 without illiberality, and who, for a long time, have ob- 
 tained a good report." " These," he adds, " we think, 
 have been unjustly deposed from the ministry. For 
 it will be no small sin in us if we depose from their 
 bishoprics those who blamelessly and piously make 
 the offerings. Happy are the presbyters who finished 
 their course before, and died in mature age, after they 
 had borne fruit, for they do not fear lest any one 
 should remove them from the place appointed for them. 
 For we see that we have removed some men of honest 
 conversation from the ministry which has been blame- 
 lessly and honourably performed by them." * 
 
 Three things are apparent from this short extract, 
 which contains, we may remark, the pith of this much- 
 disputed epistle of Clement, (i) That the constitution 
 of the early Church was popular, not hierarchical ; 
 (2) That there were no " orders," but only " offices," in 
 the Church ; and (3) that among these offices the 
 Presbyter and Episcopos are interchangeable terms, 
 implying that in Clement's time there was a Pres- 
 byterian parity, not Episcopal primacy. It was only 
 a short step from Independency to Presbyterianism ; but 
 in passing from the Greek or Republican, to the Roman 
 or Monarchical type of the Church, the struggle lasted 
 nearly a century. From Cyprian of Carthage to Cyril 
 of Alexandria we may extend the period during 
 which, with more or less bitterness, the strife had gone 
 on. In Jerome's time it was so completely settled in 
 
 * Clement, Ep. i. ch. 44. 
 
 4
 
 50 TJie Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 favour of Episcopacy, that Jerome the Presbyter can 
 only utter a lament of dissatisfaction at the loss of 
 Presbyterian parity as a thing of the past. But the 
 victorious party had to learn that the develop- 
 ment of the hierarchical principle was not to stop 
 with the triumph of Episcopacy over Presbyterianism. 
 Episcopal monarchy was, in its turn, to submit to 
 Byzantinism, or the supremacy of the State over the 
 Church ; and when that passed away with the decline 
 of the Roman Empire, there grew out of it the last 
 form of the Apostacy the papal absolutism, which is 
 the last and worst development of the hierarchical 
 principle. It is a remarkable illustration of the apostle's 
 reference to the withholding power of Caesarism that 
 exactly as the power of the Roman Caesar declined, 
 so the Roman patriarch began to assume his insignia 
 and titles. Like young Harry V. taking up the crown 
 when his father was asleep, so the Church of the West 
 acted towards the later Byzantine Empire. The de- 
 clining power of the Greek Empire tried for some 
 centuries to resist the usurpation of temporal power 
 by the Bishop of Rome. It was all in vain. One by 
 one the Imperial titles and dignities passed over from 
 secular into spiritual hands. The Pope assumed the 
 title of Pontifcx Maximus, and the Pontiff at last be- 
 came the civil as well as ecclesiastical lord of Rome, 
 with a diadem to his mitre. To this there was added 
 a double diadem, and at last the triple crown was 
 assumed by Boniface in token that the mystery of 
 iniquity the full alliance, or rather fusion, of Caesarism 
 and Clericalism was complete. The apostacy, which 
 was but a germ in the apostles' day, was now finished,
 
 The Three Temptations of tJte Church. 5 1 
 
 when it sat in the temple of God, and declared itself 
 to be God. 
 
 Thus the transformation of Christianity from a spiri- 
 tual power acting by simple attraction on the hearts of 
 men, into an external power acting coercively by laws 
 and penalties, constitutions and rescripts, was not a 
 sudden process. It was a slow and silent deterioration, 
 begun by the introduction of a leaven or hidden 
 principle foreign to the body itself. The two parables 
 of the mustard-seed and the leaven here occur as 
 throwing light on each other. As far as the first 
 parable is concerned, all is simple and self-evident. 
 Christianity grows as a tree from its seed, outwards from 
 within ; from the germ to the sprout, from the sprout 
 to the shrub, and, lastly, from the shrub to the tree, 
 we can mark the several stages, and trace its orderly 
 growth. But with the leaven it is different. Its action 
 is also that of a kind of growth outwards from within ; 
 but it is not by simple assimilation of foreign elements 
 to itself, taking up inorganic matter and making it 
 part of itself, which is the mystery of life. Making 
 that live which of itself cannot live this is growth. 
 In the case of the leaven, it is not the assimilation of one 
 body to the laws of another, but the change is re- 
 ciprocal. The leaven corrupts, and is corrupted ; 
 it destroys the Church, and is, in its turn, destroyed by 
 it. It is a case not of growth, but of fusion. Fermen- 
 tation is a kind of marriage of two bodies foreign to 
 each other, and the product is a third thing a progeny 
 partaking of the nature of both parents, but, strictly 
 speaking, different from either. It is this latter 
 
 simile which expresses the change which took place 
 
 42
 
 52 The Three Temptations of tJic Church. 
 
 when Christianity and the Roman Empire came 
 together. Rhetorical writers have described this 
 conflict and the triumph of Christianity over Paganism. 
 L. De Broglie writes* : " Founded on the same day as 
 the Christian Church, and thereby associated, though 
 with a very different title, in the promotion of the same 
 work, the Imperial monarchy of Rome was not called 
 to the same destiny. Their point of departure alone 
 was common to the two. While, despite the severest 
 trials, the Church took root, grew, and expanded over 
 the whole earth, the Roman monarchy, in the full 
 brilliance of its prosperity, at first became enfeebled, 
 was then rent piecemeal by discord, and was finally dis- 
 solved. The progress of the one and the decline of the 
 other were in almost exact correspondence." 
 
 This is a true account of the matter, if we regard the 
 single parable of the mustard-seed. Christianity grew 
 and overcame Paganism, and cast it out from its place 
 of power and throve in its stead, assimilating to itself 
 all that was great and noble and good in Paganism. 
 But besides this account of the matter, which goes 
 little further than its external growth, there is the 
 fusion, or rather confusion worse confounded, of Chris- 
 tianity as a dogmatic monarchical system, with the 
 dogmas and hierarchies, Jewish and Gentile, which pre- 
 ceded it. In this case we take up the parable of the 
 leaven. One school of interpreters understand the 
 leaven to be unmixed good ; the opposite regard it as 
 unmixed evil. Both miss the mark ; it is mixed good 
 and evil ; it is the production of a new and third thing 
 -out of the commixture of Christianity and heathenism. 
 * " L'Eglise et 1'Empire Remain, au IV. Siecle," ch. i.
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 53 
 
 Christianity was the leaven which leavened the whole 
 lump of heathenism ; but the converse is equally true 
 heathenism, in its turn, leavened the whole lump of 
 Christianity. One class of writers have attended to one 
 class of phenomena, and another to the opposite. The 
 consequence is, that to the one the history of Chris- 
 tianity has been little else than that of growth and 
 advance, in spite of some adverse events, as Mosheim 
 calls them, in his pragmatical style. To the other class, 
 it has been one continued corruption and apostacy from 
 the very beginning. The one is right in considering 
 that Christianity has leavened the world with truth, but 
 wrong in overlooking the fact that the world has, in its 
 turn, leavened the Church as much. But the other 
 school of thought is also right in saying that the history 
 of Christianity is little else than one long apostacy from 
 its true ideal ; they are only wrong in the uncharitable 
 inference that the Church has consequently altogether 
 failed of its mission, and that, were it not for an elect 
 remnant the hidden people of God, scattered every- 
 where judgment would have long since fallen on the 
 world and consumed these sinners together. 
 
 The true view we take to be this : that its assimi- 
 lation of the world to itself, by growth, as the grain of 
 mustard-seed, and also its internal assimilation to the 
 world, as the leaven and the lump are when mixed 
 that both these processes have gone on together. Both 
 are part of God's purposes. Christianity has failed of 
 its true ideal as the kingdom of God among men ; but, 
 nevertheless, the Church, with all its faults, as a cor- 
 porate body has done much, and has much yet to do. 
 Its failure has arisen from its yielding to the three
 
 54 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 forms of temptation we have glanced at bread, power, 
 and the pinnacle of the temple : endowment, establish- 
 ment, and, as the climax of the two former, spiritual 
 pride.* The Church of Constantine's time had com- 
 mitted the first of these three sins. The Church of the 
 Byzantine age, as the creature of the civil power and 
 the instrument of the Caesars' despotism, had yielded to 
 the second of these forms of temptation. It was re- 
 served for the Papacy to reach the pinnacle of the 
 temple, and to commit the last sin of spiritual pride 
 and presumption, in which a Bishop of Rome arrogates 
 to himself the twofold office of arch-priest and king, 
 and claims the two swords of temporal and spiritual 
 dominion. It is this impiety which marks the last stage 
 of the apostacy, but there is no one point in the fatal 
 descent where we can say, Here the evil began, and 
 here the Church introduced an element entirely foreign 
 to her primitive constitution. The truth is, the leaven 
 of the Scribes and Pharisees was in her from the very 
 beginning. The one temptation led on to the other. 
 Having reached the stage of a tolerated religion, she 
 longed to become a corporation, and to hold property 
 in trust, nominally for the benefit of others ; to redeem 
 captives, emancipate slaves, relieve prisoners, and other 
 such works of mercy. This position of recognition she 
 attained to under Constantine. The stages by which the 
 Church passed from a persecuted and private sect to 
 
 * Readers of Swift's " Tale of a Tub " remember the three grand ladies 
 which Peter, John, and Martin fall in love with the Duchess d'Argent, 
 Madame de Grands Titres, and the Countess d'Orgueil. This is a 
 humorous way of describing the three forms of temptation to which the 
 Church has yielded herself the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and 
 the pride of life.
 
 The Three Temptations of the Church. 55 
 
 the dignity of a dominant and intolerant State religion, 
 were these three. It was tolerated as a private sect by 
 the edict of Gallienus ; and this toleration was so evi- 
 dently the result of terror, that a change in the Em- 
 peror's temper or circumstances would inevitably have 
 restored the old persecution. But by the Edict of 
 Milan, under Constantine, a few years later, the new 
 religion was placed on a position of equality with the 
 old religion of the State, but not substituted for it, 
 according to a very common impression. Christians 
 and all others were to be permitted in all liberty to 
 follow the religion they preferred. It appertained to 
 the tranquillity of the times that all should adopt the 
 religion they liked best ; in colendo quod quisque deligeret 
 liberam haberet facnltatem. It is true that special 
 favour was shown to the Christians. But this had re- 
 ference to past persecution and injustice ; their confis- 
 cated property was to be restored or made good by the 
 Imperial treasury. If the actual holders desired in- 
 demnity, they were to apply to the prefect of their pro- 
 vince, and their case would graciously be taken into 
 consideration. Christian places of worship were to be 
 rebuilt, and all appertaining to them guaranteed for 
 the future against spoliation. But though this was a 
 decided advance on the bare toleration of Gallienus, 
 it was many stages short of what Christianity was 
 destined to become as the dominant State religion. 
 The stages by which this advance was made are many. 
 No less than eighty " Imperial Constitutions " mark the 
 seven years, 3 1 5 32 1, which followed the final overthrow 
 of Licinius ; and, doubtless, the majority of these were 
 tinctured with the new ideas. Constantine, we may say,
 
 56 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 elevated Christianity to an equality with the old reli- 
 gion. Gratian and Theodosius established its supre- 
 macy, and destroyed the possibility of all rivalry for the 
 future on the part of Paganism, which they degraded 
 and oppressed. Honorius withdrew even the small elee- 
 mosynary support which these emperors had conceded 
 to the professors of the old faith, and punished with 
 heavy penalties any officials who neglected to carry out 
 his edicts against them. Then came the sack of Rome 
 under Alaric, which finally swept away the temples and 
 other monuments of the old religion which had not been 
 converted to the uses of the new ; and when the deluge 
 of invasion had passed away, a new world had emerged 
 from the ruins of the old. Rome as a city was now 
 Christian in a sense it had never been before. 
 
 A century elapsed from 312 10410, from Constantine's 
 victory at the Milvian Bridge to Alaric's sack of Rome, 
 when the only spot in the city which the barbarian re- 
 spected was the shrine of the apostles Peter and Paul 
 this century marks the transition from a persecuted to 
 a dominant sect. We have seen that the first stage was 
 the toleration, and the second the endowment and re- 
 cognition, of the Christian Church. The third stage is 
 its complete establishment as the religio civilis of the 
 Caesars and the Empire. This stage' has been aptly 
 described by Dr. Bellinger and others as Byzantinism, 
 or that of the Establishment of the Church culminating 
 in its complete subjection to the State. In the case of 
 a Church monarchically constituted, it was only too 
 ready to bow the neck and wear its golden fetters. The 
 governing power of the civil society found itself brought 
 into the closest relations with the governing power of
 
 The Three Temptations of t/ie Church. S7 
 
 the religious society, as questions arose which required 
 their common action. The bishops thus, of necessity, 
 became a kind of Privy Council to the Emperor. The 
 troubles in the African Church, and the prominent part 
 taken by the Emperors in the suppression of the 
 Donatist schism, drew the bonds of the connection still 
 closer, and definitively committed the State to a line of 
 policy determined by the circumstances of the Church. 
 The great Arian schism and the Council of Nice, occur- 
 ring as they did only a few years after Constantine's 
 politic conversion, riveted the yoke of Caesarism still 
 more firmly round the neck of the Church. All that was 
 wanted was to adapt its organisation to the civil divi- 
 sions of the Empire ; and that, with a hierarchy ready to 
 hand, was easily effected. The existing civil divisions 
 of the Empire were adapted by the Church. The 
 bishops were given " dioceses," so named from the civil 
 divisions of the Empire, and the clergy were " paro- 
 chialised " in the same way. The seven " dioceses " of 
 the old Empire not only gave their name to the new 
 ecclesiastical divisions, but the limits of both exactly 
 corresponded. The seven dioceses included some hundred 
 and eighteen provinces, and these were made similarly 
 available. Each province, of course, contained several 
 cities of importance, with the lands attached to them. 
 These lands were called Trapoiiciai, or parishes, a 
 term properly applicable to those who dwelt in prox- 
 imity to each other. The Church system accepted the 
 arrangement, and has perpetuated the use of the term. 
 The English parishioner little dreams that in the use of 
 this familiar word he is recalling the territorial arrange- 
 ments of that great Empire which once ruled the world.
 
 58 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 Yet so it is, and the same associations are connected 
 with all the great officers of the Church. To the paro- 
 chial cities are attached bishops ; to the provinces, 
 metropolitans ; to the dioceses, patriarchs. The patron- 
 age of the Church, which before had rested on the 
 clergy and people " cum clero et populo " was now 
 transferred to the Emperor as the only representative of 
 the people under a despotic system like that of the 
 Empire.* These rights were at first only asserted, not 
 exercised, and even in the case of the great patriarchal 
 sees of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, 
 they were claimed as splendid prizes with which the 
 civil ruler was enabled to stimulate the affection or re- 
 ward the fidelity of his followers. 
 
 This change of attitude on the part of the Church 
 towards the Empire was such, that there was no halting 
 midway in the position of a tolerated and protected 
 sect. It must be admitted, in justice to the Church of 
 that day, that there was no middle course between per- 
 secution and patronage. It is an old remark that in 
 Rome there was but one step from the Capitol to the 
 Tarpeian. Under an intolerant despotism like that of 
 the Caesars, Christianity must either retire into the cata- 
 combs, or come forth as the ally of the State and wear 
 the Imperial purple. Byzantinism, as it is called, or the 
 subjection of the Church to the State, is its inevitable 
 condition under a centralised despotism. Such was the 
 jealousy of the Emperors, that they could brook no rival 
 near their throne, they could not tolerate even the old 
 
 * We are indebted for these details to an interesting work of Mr. 
 Sheppard's on " The Fall of Rome and the Rise of New Nationalities." 
 The reader will find full particulars in Bingham and Wittich.
 
 77/6' Three Temptations of tJie Church. 59 
 
 collegia, or independent guilds, which had come down 
 from the ancient times of the Commonwealth. When the 
 day came, therefore, that the persecution of the Church 
 ceased, she had to consent to wear the Imperial purple as 
 the very condition of her existence. But even her best 
 friends are not blind to the fact that this new position 
 of patronage brought with it very serious drawbacks. 
 Thus M. Capefique, himself a decided Ultramontane, 
 has to admit this. He remarks : " There are in the 
 history of all parties two periods, two situations, entirely 
 distinct that of opposition, and that of accession to 
 authority ; and of the two, the latter trial is frequently 
 the more severe. It frequently happens that a party 
 whose capacity for attack and destruction is admirable, 
 hesitates, trembles, and is lost when called to the direc- 
 tion of affairs. In this respect, Christianity itself seemed 
 better suited for patience, suffering, and martyrdom, 
 than for the duties of government." " This change in 
 the seat of Empire," he continues, "forms a revolution of 
 immense importance in the history of Christianity. It 
 would have taken a long time at Rome for a man to 
 purify himself from Paganism and assume the role of 
 the neophyte. At Constantinople, a city entirely new, 
 not a trace of Paganism remained. It was no longer 
 the martyrs' tomb which served to sustain the sacred 
 mysteries, but vast altars of porphyry or marble. Gold 
 glittered everywhere, and Constantine took as his model 
 the Biblical splendour of Solomon. The bishops, 
 priests, and deacons, were no longer dressed in . the 
 simple garment of linen or coarse stuff, which belonged 
 to the epoch of persecution and martyrdom ; they were 
 clothed as the magistrates of Greece, or the satraps of
 
 60 The Three Temptations of the Church. 
 
 Syria or Persia. The bishop bore on his head the 
 mitre adorned with precious stones ; in his hand he 
 grasped the pastoral staff in the form of a sceptre ; his 
 finger was ornamented by an amethyst of large size. 
 The dalmatic and chasuble were of silk. The priests 
 and deacons adopted splendid ornaments, rich girdles, 
 robes, and tunics. To the change, then, in the seat of 
 Empire may be ascribed the origin of ecclesiastical 
 luxury and Catholic magnificence. The idea of the 
 power of God revealed itself with such grandeur, that 
 it was natural to crave after its manifestation by the 
 pageantries of worship ; the splendour of the altar is 
 another homage to the Lord."* 
 
 Nor was it only in externals that the result of this 
 " alliance " was seen. The price which the Church had 
 to pay for all this magnificence was in the decline of 
 her spiritual independence and the loss of internal self- 
 government. Gibbon has asserted, and Hallam has ac- 
 cepted the statement, that there were no fewer than 
 eighteen thousand posts in the Church which were filled 
 by popular election ; but virtually the Emperor ap- 
 pointed the patriarch, the patriarch the metropolitan, 
 the metropolitan the bishop, and the bishop the subor- 
 dinate clergy. And further still, what the Emperor did 
 at the seat of government, the Imperial prefect imitated 
 on a smaller scale in his province ; so that, upon the 
 whole, it cannot be denied that, practically speaking, 
 ecclesiastical appointments were from very early times 
 under political influence. Already, thus early, the ques- 
 tion of investiture, the fruitful source of strife during the 
 Middle Ages, had begun to appear. The right was 
 
 * Quoted frcm Sheppard's " Fall of Rome," &c., p. 661.
 
 The TJire: Temptations of thz Church. 6 1 
 
 claimed by the Emperors of placing the consecrated 
 "pallium " on the persons of the bishops at the time of 
 their election a significant action involving the claim 
 of temporal jurisdiction over themselves and their 
 dioceses. 
 
 \Ve have said enough to show that by the middle of 
 the fourth century the Church had fully entered on that 
 stage of her downward career which may be described 
 as the apostacy. Clericalism and Caesarism, the sub- 
 jection of the laity to the priesthood, and of the priest- 
 hood to the civil power, had become fixed forms in the 
 Church. The connection between these two forms of 
 corruption is such, that the one inevitably brings the 
 other with it in its train. It is wisely ordered that it 
 should be so. Clericalism, as we see it full-blown in the 
 form of modern Ultramontanism, is such an intolerable 
 slavery, that the nations subjected to it appeal unto 
 Caesar ; they " fly from petty tyrants to the throne." Dr. 
 Dollinger, in his earlier writings, before his present 
 breach with the Roman Curia, makes much of the 
 evils of what he calls the Caesaro-Papacy, or the 
 Erastian type of subjection of the Church to the civil 
 power, common to all Protestant countries where there 
 is an Established Church at all. But he forgets that 
 Erastianism, though an evil in itself, is a remedy against 
 a greater evil that of ecclesiasticism. A Cassar-Pope 
 is a step of emancipation from a Pope-Caesar. The 
 Act of Supremacy made a Henry VIII. head of the 
 Church ; but this need not shock those who had seen an 
 Alexander or a Leo head of the Church. Of the two, 
 it was an infinitely less evil. It was the first step out 
 of bondage, and it teaches us this, that the complete
 
 62 The Three Temptations of tJie Church. 
 
 emancipation of the Church from State control and 
 patronage can only be attained when the Church re- 
 turns to her primitive simplicity, and by renouncing 
 ecclesiasticism renounces also those assumptions of 
 spiritual authority which necessitate the assertion of the 
 Erastian principle. 
 
 Our survey of the course of early Church history 
 brings us back to the point from which we set out 
 The decline of the Church is marked by her yielding to 
 the three forms of temptation which her Divine Head 
 resisted and overcame. When she is again led of the 
 Spirit into the wilderness of poverty, and submits to 
 what worldly Churchmen are pleased to call "spolia- 
 tion," then she will be like that Church of the Apoca- 
 lypse against whom the dragon in vain lets loose a flood 
 of waters. Then the earth will help the woman ; then 
 she will see her triumph in the man-child caught up to 
 the throne of God ; and then, in the fulness of time, 
 God will avenge His own elect, overturn the power of 
 Satan, and bring in the true kingdom of God among 
 men.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 CLERICALISM LEADS TO C^SARISM. 
 
 IN all inquiries such as this, of the relation of the 
 Church to the State, there is a previous question which 
 underlies the controversy, and determines our attitude 
 to it : What is our idea of the Church ? Is it or is it 
 not an external society or corporation, with an organi- 
 sation of its own, called a hierarchy or priesthood, and 
 transmitting certain supernatural powers by something 
 like succession from the apostles ? 
 
 If the Church is a corporate body of this kind, then 
 it is clear that it must hold some relation to the 
 supreme corporate body, the State ; and the more in- 
 timate that relation is, the better it will be for both 
 parties. No State can tolerate an imperium in imperio ; 
 and the evil of the Papacy is precisely this, that it is a 
 State within the State a society owning a foreign alle- 
 giance, a corporation holding property, and otherwise 
 organising itself, with little or no reference to the civil 
 power. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we have reason to think that it 
 was not Christ's intention to found a corporation of this 
 kind ; if He came preaching, not a new theocracy to 
 replace the old Jewish, but only to set up the principles 
 of the kingdom of heaven in the hearts of men then
 
 64 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 
 
 the question is greatly simplified. When we say that 
 we are Christians, what do we mean, and what is our 
 relation as Christians to the civil power ? A hierar- 
 chical system must assert itself in some way or other, 
 and strike out some form of alliance or concordat with 
 the State. Not so with a purely spiritual system, like 
 the kingdom of God. That does not depend on organi- 
 sation at all. Its bye-laws are the fewest and simplest. 
 Its civil status is merely that of a club or guild for 
 purposes of mutual edification. It has no centralised 
 authority. If it holds property, it is only under trust 
 deeds, which may be revised at any time by the Court 
 of Chancery. An institution of this kind is no menace 
 to the State, and as it barely exists in the eye of the 
 law, it may be tolerated, and even indirectly encouraged, 
 as a means for the moral education of the people, by 
 the State with perfect safety.* 
 
 It will be found that all controversies on the re- 
 lation of Church and State hinge on the question, 
 What is our idea of the Church ? To ascertain this 
 at the outset is to clear the ground of much useless con- 
 troversy with those with whom we never can agree, since 
 the principles from which we set out so widely differ. 
 Those who hold that the Christian Church is only another 
 name for the kingdom of God, have no difficulty on the 
 
 * The anonymous epistle to Diognetus, one of the few undoubted re- 
 mains of early antiquity, points out how Christians are in the world but 
 not of it, and that the relations of Christianity to the world is that of the 
 soul to the body invisible, but the source of its life and motion. This 
 conception would have been foreign to later times, when the Church 
 began to embody itself, and in this sense, as an external corporation, to 
 set up as a rival of the State. See Chapter VI. of the "Epistle to 
 Diognetus" " What the soul in the body is, that Christians are in the 
 world."
 
 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 65 
 
 subject of Establishments, the only tie which holds its 
 members being a voluntary one. Independency of the 
 State is, therefore, the natural outcome and develop- 
 ment of a spiritual society of this kind. Whether, then, 
 the Church is a spiritual society, held together by no 
 other tie than allegiance to its unseen Lord, whose life 
 flows from the Head to the members ; or whether it is 
 an organised hierarchy, holding a deposit of doctrine 
 and ritual, known as " the faith " in either case, we may 
 apply to it the remark of an eminent historian, quoted 
 by Neander (K. G. VI. p. 2), respecting the kingdoms 
 of this world, that they are best preserved by the same 
 means by which they were first founded : " Imperium 
 facile his artibus retinetur quibus initio partum est" 
 
 As all organisms have their own law of growth, 
 Christianity will develop according to one of two 
 fixed types : it is either a voluntary society with no 
 higher organisation than the congregational, ending, at 
 most, in a federation of Churches, each independent of 
 the other, and all alike subject to the civil power in 
 every matter which does not touch their allegiance to 
 Christ ; or it is a centralised hierarchy, holding a dis- 
 tinct corporate life of its own, which at one time asserts 
 its independence of the State, or even its superiority to it, 
 as the Roman hierarchy did, and at another time claims 
 special recognition and exceptional privileges in return 
 for its subjection to the powers that be, as the Greek 
 and Anglican Churches do. 
 
 Disestablishment, then, is not a simple question 
 which can be discussed upon its abstract merits, inde- 
 pendent of the nature of the Churches themselves, 
 as some politicians think. It is like begging the 
 
 5
 
 66 Clericalism Leads to Casarism. 
 
 question to speak of liberating religion from State 
 patronage and control ; for if we understand religion to 
 mean Christianity regarded in its single aspect as the 
 kingdom of God, it never took a shape which the State 
 could patronise ; its purest form was in those little re- 
 ligious republics which were founded in the cities of 
 Greece and Asia Minor. Such a religion cannot be 
 liberated from State control and patronage, for it has 
 never enjoyed it 
 
 His kingdom is not of this world, it never has been, 
 and, more than that, it never can be. It must first suffer 
 a silent transformation, such as Christianity underwent 
 between the second and fourth centuries as it passed 
 from the Greek to the Roman type of organisation, 
 before it becomes an institution which the civil power 
 can embrace, assimilate to itself, and use for purposes 
 of police. That transformation, as we know, actually 
 occurred. But the change necessitated a new relation 
 to the State. 
 
 As a hierarchical Church it is, and must ever continue, 
 of the nature of an Establishment. A connection of 
 some kind it must keep up with the State, and that 
 connection will vary with time and circumstances. It 
 may be a mere concordat, as between two independent 
 and sovereign powers, the Church and the State, or a 
 union as close as that which ties the Greek or the 
 Anglican communion to the supremacy of the civil 
 power ; but a connection of some kind there must be. 
 According as Christianity in its constitution is congre- 
 gational and popular, or hierarchical and centralised, 
 will it naturally ally itself with the State or not. It is 
 evident, from the nature of the case, that a loosely-
 
 Clericalism Leads to Casarism. 67 
 
 organised popular Church never can become an engine 
 of State, much less can it set up an imperium in im- 
 perio ; but, on the other hand, an organised hierarchy 
 always must stand in the relation to the State of an 
 equal, either as its rival or its ally. 
 
 Behind the Establishment question, therefore, and 
 antecedent to it in time, as well as prior to it in 
 real importance, lies the pretended power of the keys. 
 The Reformation has only half done its work by 
 depriving Rome of its pretended jurisdiction and claim 
 to supremacy. If National Churches are set up, as 
 was the" case in Germany and England, hierarchically 
 constituted with a sacerdotal order, and claiming a pre- 
 tended succession from the apostles, the vital element of 
 error is still in the system. It may lie dormant for a 
 generation or two, as we see in the case of Laud, before 
 it sprouts out again into a new form of spiritual des- 
 potism ; but the elements of mischief are all there, and 
 those only are to blame who set up a prelacy, and then 
 complain that it is constantly degenerating into some- 
 thing like the Papacy. 
 
 So constant is this relation between clerical organisa- 
 tion and its tendency to develop into State-Churchism, 
 that we may classify the Churches of Christendom either 
 in the order of their hierarchical development or of their 
 dependence on the principle of Establishment. The 
 most hierarchical Church is that of Rome : this Church 
 not only feels some attraction towards dominion, but is 
 actually a condominium with the State. In its most 
 arrogant form as Ultramontanism, it sets itself, in fact, 
 above the State, and claims the obedience of the Sove- 
 reign as the Viceroy of Him who is King of kings and 
 
 52
 
 68 Clericalism Leads to C&sarism. 
 
 Lord of lords. These pretensions are a little antiquated 
 now, and never would have been ventured on, even in 
 the Middle Ages, but for the break-up of the Roman 
 Empire, and the attempt of the German people to set 
 up that ghost of a dead past the Holy Roman Empire 
 of the German people. This, in its turn, encouraged the 
 Popes to meet one false pretension with another ; but 
 whatever excuse they had from the example of fictions 
 invented by the civil power, this does not diminish the 
 guilt of those who first degraded the Church into a 
 hierarchy spiritual in name, but secular in spirit. The 
 Caesaro-Papacy was thus fiction piled on fiction, and lie 
 added to lie. First the chair of Peter was set up, and the 
 pretended power of the keys asserted ; then the forged 
 Decretals and the false Donation of Constantine were 
 added : the whole resulting in one of the most amazing 
 fabrications of political arrogance devised to hold the 
 world in awe by the pretension to spiritual power. 
 
 The Oriental and Orthodox Church comes next after 
 the Roman as a hierarchically-governed Church making 
 pretensions to the power of the keys. As it is second 
 only to Rome as a sacerdotal system, so its pretensions 
 to wield political power and to share the two swords 
 with the State are second to those of Rome. As a 
 spiritual despotism, it is an admirable contrivance in the 
 hands of a despot like the Russian Czar. He has 
 moulded it accordingly to his purposes. He has set up 
 a Synod instead of the old Patriarchate, and his aide- 
 de-camp presides in that Synod as the Emperor's mouth- 
 piece. The connection of Church and State in Russia 
 is that known by Church historians as Byzantinism 
 a despotic State directing a despotic Church, and con-
 
 Clericalism Leads to Cess ar ism. 69 
 
 verting a contrivance for repressing the spiritual liber- 
 ties of mankind into an instrument for still further 
 repressing their political. 
 
 When we turn to the Anglican, we find a Church only 
 a degree less sacerdotal than the Russian, as that, in its 
 turn, is less so than the Papal. In this case, too, its poli- 
 tical status exactly corresponds to its place in the scale 
 of hierarchically-governed Churches. It is a mere 
 accident and no breach of the law we are pointing out, 
 that modern Anglicanism sometimes uses the lan- 
 guage of Free Churchmanship, and sometimes even 
 threatens what it will do when disestablished and dis- 
 endowed. But this is mere bravado the threats of 
 partisans who would shrink from being taken at their 
 word, and who know well, or ought to know from the 
 case of the Non-jurors, how soon a sect withers away 
 whose roots are not deep down in some eternal prin- 
 ciple of God or of human nature. Anglicanism is, and 
 must continue to be, a politico-ecclesiastical system. It 
 is vain to pretend that it could live on as a Free Church 
 and under a purely voluntary system. Voluntaryism 
 presupposes a popular government : a hierarchy would 
 abdicate its functions if it descended to cater for 
 popular support. Hence it is that, if Anglicanism were 
 formally disestablished to-morrow by Act of Parliament, 
 it would re-establish itself informally the day after ; and 
 this is the real crux of the question, as all who can 
 reason on the subject now see. This is the argument, 
 which is the only one that has the smallest weight for 
 maintaining the present arrangement popularly known 
 as the union of Church and State. When two ride 
 together, it is said one must sit behind the other; and
 
 70 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 
 
 at present the Church sits on the pillion behind, and must 
 take what course her lord and master, the State, assigns 
 to her. But if she were free, she would take her own 
 course, and a very mischievous one that would be accord- 
 ing to those who are shrewd observers of the reac- 
 tionary tendency of Churchmen. 
 
 Now, we do not dispute this statement, nor do we 
 question the fact that a Church like the Anglican will 
 develop two tendencies the one in the direction of 
 sacerdotalism, the other in that of a love of political 
 ascendancy. The two tendencies are inseparable, and 
 spring from the same root, which is the carnal mind 
 the mind of the disciples before the ascension of Christ, 
 not of the apostles after that event ; of Peter and John 
 as natural men, not of the same Peter and John as 
 spiritual. 
 
 But what we wish to point out is that, if we are con- 
 sistent, we shall lay the axe at the root of the tree, and 
 not merely lop off the one branch of Establishment 
 while we leave the roots of sacerdotalism in the ground 
 to spring up in a Disestablished Church. True that 
 our political action cannot go farther than this. When 
 the State has repealed the two Acts of Supremacy 
 and Uniformity the two pillars, as we may describe 
 them, on which the house of the Establishment rests 
 the State Church will then come down with its own 
 weight. But the sacerdotal element latent in Angli- 
 canism will not be much affected ; on the contrary, it is 
 likely to flourish with all the more vigour from the with- 
 drawal of the restraining force of the Erastian or mere 
 State-Church party just as the Pharisees would have 
 flourished all the more if their rivals, the Herodians,
 
 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 71 
 
 had been cut off in some way by the downfall of Herod's 
 power. We have, then, to see that our convictions are 
 thorough-going, and that our views of spiritual Chris- 
 tianity are so clear as to enable us to dispense, not 
 merely with the political support of the State, but also 
 with those props to faith which a hierarchy and its dog- 
 matic system are supposed to lend. This is the weak 
 point of the Disestablishment party, and it is well that 
 they should know the weak as well as the strong points 
 of their cause. As long as the majority of professing 
 Christians are carnal, they will say, " I am of Paul " 
 and " I of Apollos ; " and where this spirit exists, there 
 is the hierarchy in its germ. Nothing, then, but a purely 
 spiritual conception of the Church, such as the kingdom 
 of God reigning in the hearts of men, will ever coun- 
 teract these ideas of a hierarchy of which Establish- 
 mentalism is only the last word. Anglicanism, then, 
 as we judge it, is the third in the scale of hierarchical 
 Churches; and, next to the Greek and the Roman, 
 it is most dependent on political support for its 
 existence. We do not say that it is absolutely impos- 
 sible that it should become a people's Church, for 
 institutions will sometimes live on, and even seem to 
 gather strength, under conditions the very opposite to 
 those which are natural to them. Witness a peasant 
 priesthood in Ireland, with a hierarchy ranging from a 
 cardinal to a curate or hedge schoolmaster, all drafted 
 from the same class in life as that to which they minister. 
 But the exceptions in such cases as these can be 
 accounted for, and, if so, they prove the rule. Our state- 
 ment is that a hierarchical Church is one that must 
 incline to an Establishment: hence, to create a Free
 
 72 Clericalism Leads to C<zsarism. 
 
 Church in the full sense of the word, we must do more 
 than merely lop off her political privileges. To suppose 
 that the prelatical spirit will end with the expulsion of 
 bishops from the House of Lords, is to take a very 
 simple view of human nature. The roots lie down 
 deeper than our Tudor or Stuart legislation ; the origincs 
 prelatica date farther back than the Plantagenets or the 
 Conquest. We may trace them up to the day when the 
 Bishop of Rome, as pater patrum, became the Papa 
 of the West. The germ of it is in Cyprian and the 
 third century. Probably, if we had all the records of 
 the early fathers, we should say it was earlier still. 
 
 It may seem invidious to seek in even lower strata of 
 Church organisation than Anglicanism for illustrations 
 of the law that the hierarchical spirit is the real root of 
 that love of religious ascendancy of which Established 
 and National Churches are everywhere the expression. 
 But, not to touch on the Continental Churches, we see 
 in Presbyterianism another illustration of the intolerant 
 spirit which grows out of a hierarchical type of Church 
 government when in alliance with the State. In Hol- 
 land, the Calvinists were intolerant, because they enjoyed 
 political ascendancy ; and the Arminians, perhaps for 
 no better reason than that they were the weaker party, 
 and had to go to the wall, began to preach toleration 
 and the rights of conscience. It may be said of 
 Churches, as of poets, that they are cradled in wrong, 
 and what they learn in suffering that they tell in song. 
 The Arminians, or Remonstrants of Holland, set up, 
 as Laurent points out, the doctrine of the supremacy of 
 the State, and the right of all private persons to redress 
 from the Civil Courts, as a remedy against the tyranny
 
 Clericalism Leads to C<zsarism. 73 
 
 of opinion in Church Courts. They denied, in toto, the 
 power of the keys, claimed as much by the Reformed 
 Church of Holland as by the unreformed Church of 
 Rome. They went as far as to deny the Church any re- 
 gulative powers whatever ; and in their apology for the 
 Remonstrance, they state the reason to be that otherwise 
 there would be two co-ordinate powers in the State, 
 which is contrary to the essence of sovereignty, and op- 
 posed to reason. A man might as well have two heads.* 
 
 Under the name of liberty of the Church, these Dutch 
 Calvinists claimed a right circa sacra, which did not 
 end with sacred things strictly so-called. This new 
 theocracy, for it amounted to that, was as harsh and in- 
 quisitorial as that of Rome, without its excuse. A magi- 
 strate of Middleburg, who was expelled by the clerical 
 party, took his revenge on them in a satire, which had 
 an immense sale at the time, and was even translated 
 into English, with a eulogistic preface by Selden in 
 itself no mean proof that the evils of Clericalism were 
 as keenly felt in England as in Holland. 
 
 What is called Erastianism is only the same protest 
 against sacerdotalism in another quarter. Erastus was 
 physician to the Elector Palatine, and smarted under 
 the intolerance of the Calvinistic party, then dominant 
 at Heidelberg. His advice to the Elector was to allow 
 no imperium in imperio, such as Presbyterianism had set 
 up ; and the Erastian party are logically right. The 
 instant that a Church ceases to be a purely voluntary 
 and spiritual society, it must set up something like a 
 
 * Duas enim summas potestates in uno populo dari, ipsius summitatis 
 naturae repugnat. "Apologia pro Confessione Remonstrantium," ch. xxv. 
 p. 277.
 
 74 Clericalism Leads to Cczsarism. 
 
 condominium, and the question is, How far can the State 
 tolerate _this? If the State is itself popular, and not 
 bureaucratic, the conflict may be adjourned ; and there 
 need be no collision between two sovereignties, since 
 both Church and State alike are held under the people 
 as supreme. This is why in the Swiss Republics a 
 Presbyterian form of Church government, though 
 Established and State-paid, has not been a menace to 
 liberty. But in centralised and bureaucratic States a 
 collision inevitably occurs between the Church Courts 
 and the Civil, and one of the two must give way. The 
 law of self-preservation being the first in politics as in 
 life, statesmen are not to blame for asserting an extreme 
 Erastianism in face of clerical pretensions. If all parties 
 were wise, the Church would cease to be a theocracy, and 
 then Erastianism would disappear with the cause which 
 produced it. But how can we complain of the seven- 
 teenth century for not seeing a truth which the nineteenth 
 century is only groping after ? An Established Presby- 
 terian Church seems to invite the growth of Erastianism 
 as its natural and necessary antidote ; and whenever the 
 two are opposed, it is needless to add that the weaker 
 has to submit. If this were all, the hardship would not 
 be so great. Of two evils we should choose the least, 
 and Erastianism is undoubtedly a less evil than Cleri- 
 calism. But we must not blind ourselves, on the other 
 hand, to the evils of Erastianism. Theykr circa sacra 
 is too great a trust to put into the hands of any absolute 
 and often irresponsible prince. What mischief it has 
 wrought in Germany is almost incredible till we have 
 studied the question thoroughly, and ascertained the 
 true causes of the rise of Rationalism. The Professorate
 
 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 75 
 
 in the Universities, the training, in other words, of the 
 religious teachers of the age, is one of those sacra ; is it 
 to be wondered at, therefore, that secular powers should 
 administer their patronage for secular ends ? Water, 
 we know, cannot be forced in our houses above the 
 height from which it is turned on in the reservoir. The 
 Church of Christ has brought in all this flood of 
 Rationalism on herself by allying herself with the world- 
 power for dogmatic and controversial purposes. She 
 has forgotten the golden rule, that none but spiritual 
 persons can do spiritual work. A Presbyterian National 
 Church is more even to blame on this account than an 
 Episcopal, for presumably she had more light, and at 
 least held a purer theory of the relation of the Church 
 to the world. She never committed the same act of 
 spiritual adultery, as we may describe it, of accepting an 
 Act like the Act of Supremacy. Indeed, she always 
 protested against it, and asserted the headship of Christ 
 in deed as well as in word. But the ignis fatuus of 
 Nationalism blinded her, as it has other Churches as 
 well, and for it she sacrificed many precious grains of 
 truth. She denounced the sectaries, and emphatically 
 rejected the new and damnable doctrine of toleration 
 and the rights of conscience, which Baptists and Inde- 
 pendents proclaimed, as if they were pestilent heresies. 
 The Presbyterians, indeed, were so enamoured with the 
 Old Testament theory of National Churches, that they 
 landed themselves in worse inconsistencies even than the 
 Anglicans. The latter, at least, were consistent in 
 preaching up passive obedience and a theory of the 
 Divine right of kings, which would have been extrava- 
 gant at the Court of Louis XIV., and was simply
 
 76 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. 
 
 contemptible at that of Charles II. Anglicanism had 
 taken the State to itself as its master, and though its 
 master was one who dawdled away its time between 
 Hobbism and Popery, this, at least, was not so foreign to 
 the genius of a system, which is itself a curious compound 
 of the two. But what had Presbyterians to say in the 
 camp of the royal martyr ? Milton, in his Defence of 
 the English People, uttered a warning voice, but in vain. 
 " Woe be to you, Presbyterians, especially if ever any 
 of Charles' race recovers the sceptre ! Believe me, ye 
 shall pay all the reckoning." 
 
 History, then, is full of illustrations of the evil of 
 Clericalism in alliance with the State. It is only half 
 the remedy to free the Church, as it is called, in the 
 phrase of the age, from State patronage and control. 
 The Church, or rather the people of the Church, must 
 also free themselves from Clericalism, or that power of 
 the keys which is dear to the professional theologian. 
 Only half the battle is won by Disestablishment. The 
 more dangerous part of the fight remains in guarding 
 against the re-establishment, in some informal way, of a 
 so-called Free Church, full of the hierarchical spirit, full 
 of tradition and dogma, and only yielding itself appa- 
 rently to popular movements, in order to check and 
 defeat them, like Charles II. signing the Convention of 
 Breda with the intention of breaking it at the first 
 opportunity. 
 
 The conclusion we have reached at this stage of our 
 inquiry is this that Disestablishment is only part of a 
 larger question, and that to carry it by a mere coup de 
 lEglise in Parliament would be a barren gain to the cause 
 of the Free Churches. A hierarchical Church is, ought to
 
 Clericalism Leads to Cczsarism. 77 
 
 be, a State-governed Church. To liberate it is, as it 
 were, to let loose on society a class of sacerdotalists, 
 who might become the same danger to the State that 
 the clerical party are in Belgium or in Italy. Cavour's 
 maxim of a free Church in a free State is a mischie- 
 vous sophism or a great truth, according as it is carried 
 out in a thorough-going spirit or not. If it means that 
 there are to be two dominions side by side, two co-or- 
 dinate authorities, one of them a so-called spiritual, 
 but thoroughly secular power, to enforce its laws in its 
 own way, then we should say that Bismarck's way of 
 dealing with the Church is preferable to Cavour's. A 
 free Church implies a spiritual Church, or at least a 
 society whose bye-laws are only those of an ordinary 
 club, and which, therefore, cannot in any case come in 
 collision with the laws of the land. But if marriage is 
 to be regarded as a sacrament, and orders as indelible, 
 and vows as irrevocable ; and if the rule of non possnmus 
 is to be acted on, that the Church may acquire property, 
 but never give it up then to treat such a Church as free 
 is to give up State sovereignty. Italy, on account of 
 her own weakness, and the malicious jealousy of France, 
 hounded on as she is by the clerical party, has had to 
 make this compromise, and give currency to a phrase 
 whose hollowness no one knew better than its astute 
 author. Germany being strong and united, and mistress 
 of herself, used no such misleading phrases. Her 
 statesmen are Erastians, as some would call them, of the 
 extremest type ; but it is an Erastianism not only 
 excusable, but absolutely justifiable, under the circum- 
 stances. The Romish hierarchy is both endowed and 
 established in Germany. If they wish for more liberty,
 
 78 Clericalism Leads to C&sarism. 
 
 they must take it on the only terms which a strong 
 State could consent to. It is only in Turkey and 
 Egypt that there are capitulations exempting Franks 
 from being arraigned before the Turkish tribunals ; but 
 even there those capitulations are found intolerable, and 
 are at last surrendered. It is not in this way that the 
 question of Disestablishment is to be carried out, and 
 Nonconformists who now call for it would be the last 
 to agree to it, if it were to be granted on these terms. 
 If we are thankful for anything, it is for the lessons of 
 even-handed justice which the three centuries before and 
 since the Reformation have taught Europe. We should 
 divide the six centuries since Hildebrand into two equal 
 portions, and say that during the first three the Church 
 has tyrannised over the State, during the last three the 
 State has tyrannised over the Church. There has been 
 injustice on both sides. The Erastian idea has arisen 
 to chastise the Church for yielding to the Hildebrandine. 
 At last, let us hope that the one wrong will be purged 
 by suffering the other, and a really free Church will 
 emerge in Europe side by side with a really free State. 
 Both sides will have to give up much, and the bureau- 
 cracy or political hierarchy will have to abate its pre- 
 tensions as well as the spiritual. We are at present still 
 in the midst of the fight, and the party cries which we 
 hear of Disestablishment on the one hand, and of the 
 duty of maintaining a national profession of religion on 
 the other, are rather misleading than otherwise. The 
 knot lies at the point where the kingdom of heaven 
 touches earth. As soon as the Divine idea becomes 
 incorporated in any one society, much more in one that 
 claims to be the Church Catholic and Apostolic, it is at
 
 Clericalism Leads to C<zsarism. 79 
 
 once an institution of time, to be dealt with and regu- 
 lated as any other by law and precedent. It is an emi- 
 nent jurist who has seen more clearly, perhaps, than 
 any divine, the only conditions under which the Church 
 can liberate herself, and get out of the meshes of statute 
 law. Puffendorf, in his treatise, " De habittt religionis 
 Christianas ad vitam civilem" has seen to the bottom of 
 a question which may be said to have been the conflict 
 of ages. He sets out with asserting that the Church 
 never can be a State within the State, but simply an 
 association submitted, as such, to the control and in- 
 spection of the civil power. " The capital question," 
 he adds, "is to ascertain whether Jesus Christ ever 
 meant to establish some spiritual power to which His 
 followers were to submit themselves. If we admit that 
 such a power exists, then there is nothing for us Pro- 
 testants to do but to recant, and to make our submission 
 again to the Pope. But we have only to read the 
 Scriptures with an unprejudiced mind to see that the 
 Founder of Christianity never meant to invest His 
 apostles with any such power. He was a master who 
 taught His disciples. He came with a revelation of the 
 Word of Life to those who had ears to hear it. He 
 came to teach poverty of spirit, and meekness of heart. 
 His commission to His apostles was to preach the glad 
 tidings, not to set up a new government in the world. 
 And in what does this good news consist ? That the 
 kingdom of heaven is opened, that the end of all things 
 is at hand, and that it is the duty of all to repent. 
 Again, what is the meaning of the remission of sins ? 
 Did the apostles exercise any special power or jurisdic- 
 tion in their remission? On the contrary, it is by
 
 8o Clericalism Leads to C&sarism. 
 
 faith that we obtain that remission, and the kingdom of 
 heaven is opened to all them that believe. This is the 
 teaching of Christ and His apostles. There is in it not 
 a shadow of claim to anything like power. As for the 
 Church, it is only the company of the faithful ; but does 
 this association confer on it any new rights, or give it 
 any coercive authority or empire ? Its mission remains 
 the same, which is to teach and to preach the remission 
 of sins. When it acts, it acts as all free societies do, by 
 way of common consent, not by way of authority or 
 command. This Church cannot pretend to be a State 
 within the State, for if it were a power, then one of two 
 things must occur : either there would be two sovereign 
 powers, and then anarchy and dissolution of the social 
 tie ; or the State would be subordinated to the Church, 
 in which case it would cease to be the State. Is it, 
 think you, to set up anarchy, or to organise a theocracy, 
 that Jesus Christ has come into the world ? " 
 
 The knot is here cut, and nothing more need be added 
 to this conclusion. The question of Establishment is, 
 as we have seen, a question of what we mean by Church 
 and State. As all are agreed as to the meaning of the 
 latter term, and no one disputes its claim to supremacy, 
 the key of the controversy lies in the equivocal term 
 Church. The word is everything or nothing, according 
 to our views of spiritual truth. The High Churchman is 
 commonly said to be one who lays great stress on the 
 corporate idea of the Church, and the Low Churchman 
 the one who takes the opposite view of the matter. 
 But suppose we go one stage lower than the ordinary 
 Low Churchman, we reach the point where Churchman- 
 ship, as we may call it, evaporates altogether, and
 
 Clericalism Leads to Ccesarism. Si 
 
 nothing remains but a sublimated faith or a Divine 
 Person, allegiance to whom is the only tie of spiritual 
 fellowship. This is the true starting-point of our inquiry 
 the place where we can see room for a free Church in 
 a free State. As soon as Christians are ripe for this 
 and some classes are ripe for it by their not being 
 ashamed to own that they belong to a sect and discard 
 altogether the phrase of the Catholic Church then we 
 have reached the stage of religious voluntaryism in 
 which the Disestablishment question becomes easy and 
 self-evident. To educate Christians for this is the task 
 of the Free Churches ; to prepare Churchmen for it the 
 duty of those who have parted with all hierarchical 
 ideas. Organised Christianity and Establishments are 
 on the same plane of thought, and, therefore, with 
 thorough consistency, those who have moved off from the 
 one are prepared to recede from the other.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 TENDENCY OF ALL ORGANISED CHURCHES TO 
 GRAVITATE TOWARDS ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 IF we look at the question in the light of pure reason, 
 we must admit that a legal Establishment of one form 
 of religion in preference to every other is a two-fold 
 wrong a wrong to the religion so preferred, and also a 
 wrong to those which are passed by. It is a wrong 
 equally on the assumption that one form of organised 
 Christianity is more of God than any other, and on the 
 opposite assumption that all are alike developments on 
 man's part, as well as accommodations on God's part, to 
 the varying growths of society. Lastly, it is a wrong 
 whether we hold that the free play of conscience requires 
 that no temporal inducements should be held out to 
 men to embrace one form of religious truth in preference 
 to every other, or whether we say, with "jesting Pilate," 
 What is truth? and therefore regard all State profession 
 of religion as an organised hypocrisy. Earnest men, 
 then, of all schools alike, whether sceptics or religionists, 
 may look on a State Establishment as a mischievous 
 contrivance for smothering convictions and impressing 
 on dead creeds the air and appearance of living beliefs. 
 
 Thus, if we follow the logical order, we should 
 condemn all Establishments in the abstract, and then
 
 Tendency of Organised Churches to Establishment. 83 
 
 combine to put an end to that particular form of Estab- 
 lishment which prevails in this country. Still, the 
 majority of men do not follow the logical order or 
 rather, we should say that the question does not present 
 itself to them for settlement in that order. To them 
 the concrete presents itself before the abstract, the par- 
 ticular before the general. It is only when the shoe 
 pinches, as we should say, that they begin to see how bar- 
 barous and ignorant our method has been to fit the foot 
 to the shoe, and not the shoe to the foot in other words, 
 to provide a religion for the people, and then to expect 
 religious convictions to shape themselves according to 
 the pattern of uniformity set up by the State. The mis- 
 takes of over-government in trade, and other directions, 
 were pointed out by Adam Smith and his school in the 
 last century, and have been slowly remedied during this 
 century. But we still go on perpetuating this mistake 
 in religion, partly because men of the world are too 
 indifferent to the rights of conscience to see that it is a 
 wrong to repress its free play, but principally because 
 even those who see the abstract reason for Disestablish- 
 ment do not see the practical necessity for dealing with 
 our existing State Church. 
 
 It is not our intention, then, to add another to the 
 many excellent treatises on the abstract question of 
 Establishments in general. No words of ours could add 
 to the weight of the testimony of such a thinker as 
 Vinet. It is both more modest and true to fact to say 
 that all that we have ever learned of the supremacy of 
 conscience and of the duty of preserving a sacred 
 recess, into which truth only can enter as light enters 
 a room when the windows are unbarred, has been 
 
 62
 
 84 Tendency of all Organised Churches 
 
 learned at the feet of Vinet. Milton would have taught 
 this truth in his day, but the seventeenth century was 
 not able to bear it. We make a great mistake if we fail 
 to see that the century after the Reformation was a dog- 
 matic stage of the human mind ; men had only broken 
 off one yoke of authority to impose on themselves 
 another. It is difficult to say whether the Synod of 
 Dort or the Council of Trent was the most intolerable 
 form of dogmatism ; the only result of the Reformation 
 for the first century and a-half seemed to be that, whereas 
 the spirit of inquiry had to reckon with only one infal- 
 lible Church it had now to reckon with four ; there were 
 the Tridentine, the Anglican, the Lutheran, and the 
 Calvinist Churches all equally intolerant, and equally 
 persuaded that with them alone lay the one deposit of 
 Divine and infallible truth. The persecution of opinion 
 as such was held to be a duty both of Church and State; 
 and toleration itself, as we gather from Sir William 
 Browne's essay on the subject, was only tolerated as the 
 excuse of indolent minds who had no genius for disputes 
 on religion. Toleration, in fact, was a cry of distress 
 put up when the oppression of some dominant Church 
 could be borne no longer. Hence it was that toleration 
 was held more or less by the sects which were persecuted, 
 and rejected by them as often as the wheel of fortune 
 brought them to the summit and their adversaries under 
 their feet. The Arminian Baptists, it is true, came very 
 near the admission of this truth ; and the Cambridge 
 Platonists, though more a sect of philosophers than of 
 religionists, exalted it almost into a dogma of belief. It 
 is to the honour of the Society of Friends that they have 
 never wavered on this subject. Their testimony has been
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 85 
 
 uniform, because of all the sects they are the only one 
 which rested it on a religious and not merely on an 
 ethical principle. In the doctrine of the inner light 
 of conscience they may be said to have found the 
 key to the connection between natural and revealed 
 religion, which was almost lost to the Church during 
 the reign of dogmatic systems resting on the principle 
 of authority. 
 
 Others have clearly pointed out the evils of State 
 Churches ; but no one has ever gone to the roots of the 
 question so thoroughly as Vinet. He has elevated 
 individualism into a principle. He is a believer in the 
 reality of the fall, and the consequent contrast between 
 the actual and the ideal of humanity, as deep as 
 either Augustine or Pascal ; but he has not fallen into 
 their mistake, and set up a rival society, called the 
 external historical Church, as the antidote and corrective 
 to the evils of that other external society known as 
 the State. This was only to set up one Establishment 
 to check another, which has ended, as we might expect, 
 either in their coalition, which is the most monstrous 
 form of tyranny, or their open collision, which is a state 
 of anarchy scarcely less deplorable. All this Vinet has 
 seen and described with a penetration and point which 
 leave nothing to be desired. On this subject we are 
 content to sit at his feet and confess ourselves to be his 
 disciple. He has seen, more than any other writer 
 whom we can refer to, that "the fiction of a State 
 Church is, of all things, the best adapted to put con- 
 sciences to sleep, and that the more this institution puts 
 on sonorous titles and pompous insignia, the more fast 
 and profound will the sleep of those consciences be."
 
 86 Tendency of all Organised Churches 
 
 "Nothing," he adds, in another paragraph, " intimidates 
 or perverts the religious sentiment so much as contact 
 with the civil power. Religion in the hands of the last 
 inevitably becomes a species of police. Conscience, 
 hurt and alarmed, retires within itself, creates within 
 itself in. secret a religion which is exclusively its own, 
 leaving to shallow souls the religion of form or the 
 forms of religion. But when, on the contrary, it is free 
 from all impure contact, the religious sentiment spreads 
 itself abundantly throughout life and society, penetrates 
 the masses, filters through to the seat of power, forms 
 without contract or convention a Christian nation, a 
 Christian Government. Authority then takes its tone 
 from public conviction, and is thus the most precious of 
 all expressions of society ; its morality is Christian, its 
 policy is Christian, because morals have inscribed this 
 necessity on its mandates." 
 
 On this subject we have nothing to add. We 
 can only say of those who do not see the force 
 of these arguments that they are defective in spiritual 
 insight. They neither understand the fall which is 
 the cause of man's present duality, nor the plan 
 of redemption which is the means of his ultimate 
 restoration to unity with himself. For the present 
 there must be two distinct spheres of action the 
 secular and the spiritual, the State and the Church. 
 Pelagians and Pantheists quite consistently deny the 
 fall, and, consequently, this dualism, out of which the 
 contrast of Church and State arises. Hence it is, as 
 Vinet remarks, that "Spinoza, as well as Hume and 
 Hobbes, gives up religion to the civil Government. 
 Thinkers of the Materialist or Fatalist school are firm
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 87 
 
 upholders of a State religion." The advocate for State 
 Churches does not even know, or at least forgets, the 
 lessons of history, which invariably teach that religion 
 recovers new life in proportion as it withdraws out of 
 the State's sphere of attraction, and the State withers 
 and paralyses whatever it touches in the spiritual 
 domain. When Bonaparte restored altars he did not 
 restore religion ; she was recovering without him : he 
 stifled her in the purple, and under his icy hand the 
 sacred oil, which had begun to flow in the fire of trial, 
 was soon seen to congeal again. Advocates of Estab- 
 lishments have, indeed, so little to say on the abstract 
 ground that they now prudently keep off from it. They 
 have changed their note, and as the system of State 
 Churches can no longer be defended on the dogmatic 
 grounds formerly taken up, they generally content them- 
 selves with the argument of an indolent and half cynical 
 Conservatism that it is one thing to establish a new 
 Church, another thing to disestablish an old. It is 
 an argument founded on the philosophy of indifference, 
 and is well summed up in the old saw, fieri non debet 
 factum valet. In general, as Vinet observes, the system 
 of State Churches defends itself chiefly by attacking 
 others. It contents itself for the most part with con- 
 testing the worth and, above all, the possibility of the 
 opposite systems proposed, and trying, by way of 
 exclusion, to establish the right that is denied to it. 
 How true this is we may judge from the case of all 
 the three essays to which the Peek prizes in support 
 of State Churches were recently awarded. All three 
 essays, and the first, in order of merit, the most dis- 
 tinctly of the three, renounce and even repudiate, with
 
 88 Tendency of all Organised Churches 
 
 something like contempt, the old-fashioned syllogism of 
 our boyhood 
 
 " The State is bound to maintain the truth ; 
 The Church, as by law established, is that truth ; 
 Therefore the duty of the State," &c., &c. 
 
 The fallacy lying in the undistributed middle term 
 truth is now so apparent, that we need not waste argu- 
 ment on persons so prejudiced as to cling to it in spite 
 of its obviously equivocal use. No intelligent mind, 
 able to write for or adjudicate on such essays as the 
 three to which the Peek prizes were awarded, would 
 repeat arguments like these, which have only to be 
 thrown into the form of a syllogism to show their 
 fallacy. The ground is now, as Vinet remarks, one of 
 an attack on Voluntaryism rather than of defence 
 of Establishmentalism in itself. According to the 
 first of the three writers, all tolerated i.e., law-pro- 
 tected Churches are of the nature of Establishments. 
 No society that touches earth at all, as it must 
 do, if it have any property even in a building in 
 which to meet, or any bye-laws to regulate the 
 relation of its members to each other, can with- 
 draw itself from the cognizance of the laws of the 
 land. But, as in many cases of sophistical reason- 
 ing, we have here a sounding truism covering a mis- 
 chievous paradox. The supremacy of the law is what 
 every one admits ; yet it is equally a maxim of law that 
 every man's house is his castle. The wind of heaven 
 may enter it, but no one may pass the threshold without 
 a warrant to show that the law has been broken by the 
 owner. This maxim if it, too, is not a mere sounding 
 truism implies, that the law may protect institutions
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 89 
 
 without being called on to go a step farther and patronise 
 them, much less accord to them exclusive privileges and 
 advantages. That every corporation, ecclesiastical as 
 well as civil, is amenable to the law, is only to affirm the 
 Act of Supremacy, which, if it had stopped short at that 
 negative point, would have never met with a dissentient 
 voice in England outside the Ultramontane party. But 
 it is like asking an inch and taking an ell to go on from 
 that to the statement that, since all Churches have a 
 temporal side on which they are amenable to the courts 
 of law, the Executive should therefore take them in 
 hand and convert them into departments of State, or, 
 worse still, establish one sect to the exclusion of the rest. 
 In reply to the charge that the Establishment is a State- 
 made and a State-paid Church, Anglicans are in the 
 habit now of replying that it is neither the one nor the 
 other. They say that the National Church is simply the 
 old historical Church of Augustine's planting, which fell 
 in the eleventh century under the centralising tyranny of 
 the Bishop of Rome, and from which the Tudor kings 
 delivered her, not without much robbery and spoliation 
 on their part. They compelled her to pay the price of 
 redemption from Rome by subjecting her to another 
 yoke viz., that of Parliament and the civil power, which 
 was only a little less galling than that of Rome from 
 which she was delivered. This Anglican theory, which 
 we do not intend here to discuss, is like many other 
 theories of history difficult either to establish or to 
 refute. It has some facts in its favour, many others 
 against it ; at all events, it is only a theory a subjective 
 way, that is, of marshalling facts whose truth depends 
 on the point of view through which we look at them.
 
 9O Tendency of all Organised CJmrches 
 
 Our intention is not to refute this new theory of an 
 Establishment, but only to remark that it is new. It is 
 an instance of the way in which the old dogmatic 
 argument of the theocracy has given way under its 
 defenders. State Churchmen have nothing to say for 
 a State Church per se, but only for the particular arrange- 
 ment which still has the force of law in this country. 
 So selfish and sectarian in this sense has Anglicanism 
 grown, that its advocates had scarcely a word to say for 
 the Irish Establishment, which they let go by default. 
 If the principle of Establishments were not worm-eaten 
 by scepticism on all sides the deepest sceptics being 
 its loudest advocates, the political Conservatives we 
 should have heard something of the principle when it 
 was challenged in Ireland. Men who have a conviction 
 do not desert it when it does not work true in details ; 
 but, retaining the principle, try it again and again until a 
 machinery is found adapted to the motive power within. 
 In the case of Anglicanism, it is changing front every 
 day, and it is impossible to say how much it holds of 
 the Establishment principle at present beyond sticking 
 close to the endowments, which it claims by a sort of 
 Divine right as given to God in times of supersti- 
 tion, and inalienable now, because there is a Divine 
 law that endowments may increase, but never may 
 decrease. 
 
 The modern argument for Establishments, then, 
 merely amounts to this : that, since all Establishments 
 imply endowments, conversely all endowments imply 
 Establishments ; which is about as logical as to say 
 that, since all black sheep are ruminants, all ruminants 
 are black sheep. Vinet has exposed the fallacy in the
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 91 
 
 aphorism on the difference between civil and religious 
 marriage : " Every citizen is not a believer, but every 
 believer is a citizen. Religious laws can only bind those 
 who believe in them ; but civil laws bind every man who 
 lives among men." It is thus an argument against 
 endowments, and one in favour of Voluntaryism, pure 
 and simple, that all endowments and trust-deeds 
 entangle those who hold them with the affairs of this 
 life contrary to the word of the apostle. Like a wise 
 teacher, he does not condemn those things in toto, but 
 he points out to us what they lead to. An endowment 
 is, we admit, a ^/^/-Establishment ; it is a step in the 
 direction of a State Church. We admit this ; but, 
 if warned by history of the fatal descent from hold- 
 ing property under the State to becoming its servant, 
 may we not choose the nobler alternative of refusing 
 altogether to tie up the grace of God in a trust- 
 deed, like the sword of the giant wrapped in an 
 ephod, and becoming rusty because unused ? The 
 experience of the Free Churches as to endowments does 
 not encourage them to repeat the attempts of their 
 fathers of last century. If wise men, they let them go 
 by default, and cast themselves on the people, as the 
 mendicant orders did in their early and better days. To 
 do so is to cast away the only apology for Establish- 
 ments which the modern intellect can offer. The argu- 
 ment of these advocates of State Churches only amounts 
 to a kind of tu quoque against the Dissenters, which con- 
 firms Vinet's remark, that modern Establishmentarians 
 attack others rather than defend themselves. If Esta- 
 blishmentalism covers all tolerated Churches, then the 
 National Church, as she is called by way of emphasis, is
 
 92 Tendency of all Organised Churches 
 
 only one of many cults all claiming equal rights to be 
 regarded as national. If this means anything, it means 
 concurrent endowment with concurrent Establishment ; 
 and how would its advocates like to work out their own 
 principle ? The first result would be the repeal of the 
 Act of Uniformity, and the throwing open of cathedral 
 and other pulpits to Churchmen and Dissenters alike. 
 The State is not going to enforce the limitations of a 
 sacerdotal sect on the one hand, and allow it, on the 
 other hand, to claim all the privileges of the National 
 Church. This is that way of playing fast and loose with 
 the subject which prevails in clerical circles. The 
 Church is broad and national on the one hand, narrow 
 and denominational on the other. Talk of its endow- 
 ments and its right to them, and then it is to be treated 
 as a National Church ; talk of the rights of others to go 
 shares in these good things of this life, and then it is 
 narrow and exclusive, resting on the figment of apos- 
 tolical succession. 
 
 We conclude, then, this chapter, as we set out, with 
 the remark, that it is not enough to show that the old 
 arguments for State Churches from the duty of the 
 State and from Old Testament example are all obsolete. 
 No one admits this more readily than the modern advo- 
 cate for Establishments. Not one of the three writers 
 of the Peek prize essays condescends to notice the old 
 apologies for Establishments, which did good service in 
 the old days of dogmatic theology and the right Divine 
 of kings. The modern argument for a constitution 
 like ours in Church and State is, that it exists and has 
 its roots in the past. No one, it is said, would dream of 
 setting up such an institution as the English Establish-
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 93 
 
 ment ; but, finding it in existence, we should be rash in- 
 deed to think of pulling it down. What these reasons are 
 for keeping up what it would be absurd to call into exist- 
 ence, we forbear to inquire ; but the reason avowed by 
 men like Sir John Lubbock is, that to clear it away 
 would do more harm than good. "It is one thing," 
 said Sir J. Lubbock in an election speech at Maidstone, 
 " to disestablish a weak Church ; quite another thing to 
 abandon all control over a remarkably strong one. The 
 result of the separation would be," he went on to 
 say, " not merely to disestablish and disendow the 
 Church of England, but also to create and establish a 
 gigantic, powerful, and wealthy ecclesiastical corpo- 
 ration independent of State control. Thus," he added, 
 " the true effect would be, not to disestablish the Church, 
 but to disestablish the State." This is the old argument 
 paraded so often in Germany, that the only remedy 
 against Ultramontanism is Erastianism. We do not see 
 the absolute necessity of being driven to an alternative 
 between two forms of evil ; we are not reduced to the 
 hopeless condition of the chickens, who were consulted 
 whether they would be roast or boiled, and who were so 
 illogical as to answer, " Neither." Those who argue in 
 this way are scarcely sincere in saying that they fear 
 the outbreak of an Anglican spiritual despotism worse 
 than that of Rome. What they really mean, if they 
 said out their innermost thoughts, is, that they dislike 
 all strong assertion of individual conviction on religious 
 subjects which the sect principle implies. State reli- 
 gions, as Vinet observes, have no more zealous cham- 
 pions than the adversaries of all positive religion. 
 Spinoza, as well as Hobbes and Hume, gives up religion
 
 94 Tendency of all Organised Churches 
 
 to " the civil Government Thinkers of the materialist 
 or fatalist school are firm upholders of a State religion." 
 On this account it is that the real foe which the Libe- 
 ration Society has to fight is not the old-fashioned 
 dogmatist, whether Evangelical or Anglican. They are 
 stiff for existing endowments and but little else ; and, if 
 the endowments were left to be disposed of as they 
 pleased, would only be too thankful to be relieved of 
 the control of the State. But the real champions of 
 Establishment, pure and simple, are the Erastian or 
 Broad Church party the Herodians of modern religion, 
 who hate spiritual religion as much as the Pharisees do, 
 but who are too wise to let their hatred appear. It is 
 all hidden under a mask of comprehensive charity. 
 What they desire, however, that they dare not avow. 
 The system of State Churches can only be advan- 
 tageously defended from the point of view of Pantheism. 
 This is one of Vinet's penetrating remarks, in which he 
 shows how much farther he sees into the question than 
 writers who have only a slender acquaintance with 
 recent German thought and its tendencies. To under- 
 stand, for instance, Rothe's State Churchmanship, we 
 must know his Pantheistic leanings ; and the school of 
 English Broad Churchmen are much nearer to Rothe's 
 position than, perhaps, they are themselves aware of. 
 In Arnold and Stanley's case, the old Hooker argument 
 for the civil supremacy over the ecclesiastical has been 
 worked up to mean something which the judicious 
 Hooker little thought of, and which, if he were con- 
 sulted about, he would distinctly deny that it is fairly 
 filiated on him. 
 
 But, be that as it may, these are only instances of
 
 To Gravitate towards Establishment. 95 
 
 what occurs every day. Men take their side, and then 
 find reasons for doing so, and invent high-flying 
 theories which are said to cover their case, but only 
 do so in the very limited sense that a kite in the air 
 covers the boy who is flying it from a string. We 
 have seen too many such theories rise, dance in the 
 light, and then, like bubbles, burst from their own empti- 
 ness, to care to argue down theories which are only 
 invented for argument's sake. With regard to these 
 theories set up to prove Establishments, we may leave 
 them to die out like the older Ptolomean astronomy, 
 which it took a century from Kepler to Newton to dis- 
 pose of. In this respect, theories die hard. It was so 
 with the Newtonian philosophy : the elder Bernouilli 
 died a Cartesian, the younger grew up a Newtonian. 
 It was not because the father was a less eminent mathe- 
 matician than the son, or less capable of comprehend- 
 ing the Principia, that the task of abandoning the old 
 philosophy was too much for him. It required a genera- 
 tion to bridge over the abyss between the vortices of the 
 one philosophy and the attraction principle of the other. 
 So it will be with this question of Disestablishment. 
 When the time for the change has come, the great mass 
 of mankind will pass over from one abstract principle to 
 another under the driving impulse of an imperious 
 necessity, and will scarcely feel the wrench it has been, 
 so lightly do theories sit on the consciousness of most 
 men. The quomodo and the quando will teach them the 
 quia. There are only two points which we have any 
 need to enforce in this stage of the argument : I. The 
 necessity for disestablishing a Church which is already 
 denationalising itself and becoming every day more of
 
 96 Tendency of Organised Churches to Establishment. 
 
 a sacerdotal sect; and 2. The duty of securing revenues 
 for national purposes which, if left much longer under 
 present trusts, will soon lose their national character 
 and be regarded as private trusts. 
 
 If we can establish these two principles, we shall 
 prove all that we have attempted to do, and to that task 
 we now address ourselves in order.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE "FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE" 
 THEORY CRITICISED. 
 
 THE aspirations and tendencies both of statesmen and 
 Churchmen are alike in one direction. Under a vague 
 sense that there is no union but by subjection either of 
 Church to State or the converse, both sides repeat, with 
 more or less sincerity, the celebrated formula of the 
 Italian statesman A Free Church in a Free State: 
 Libera Chiesa in Liber o State. But, before those aspira- 
 tions can become realities and those tendencies shape 
 themselves in facts, a revolution must occur in men's 
 ideas as to what the Church is. Her liberation from 
 subjection to the State can only be effected on one 
 condition, viz., that the Church shall renounce her 
 hierarchical character, and abjure that usurpation of the 
 rights of the entire community as kings and priests unto 
 God. In God's moral government of the world, we 
 often see one form of oppression or repression of Divine 
 truth called in to check and neutralise another. Church 
 history for fifteen centuries may be summed up as the 
 struggle of Csesarism against Clericalism. The liberties 
 of the people have been held in pledge between these 
 contending powers. At one time the Church was the 
 champion of popular liberties, and at another the State. 
 
 7
 
 98 The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 The cause of truth has stood aloof from both ; but at 
 one time it has been forced to appeal to Caesar against 
 the hierarchy, and at another to the hierarchy against 
 Caesar. Even in the lifetime of the Apostles, the germ 
 of this long struggle of centuries is seen when the 
 Apostle Paul was challenged by the Roman governor 
 Felix whether he would go to Jerusalem, and there be 
 judged of those things which were laid against him : 
 he refused, and appealed unto Caesar. The reason of 
 that appeal was, that the Apostle correctly judged that 
 he would be more likely to receive fair play from a civil 
 than from a clerical tribunal. In the language of the 
 Apocalypse, the earth has thus helped the woman, and 
 swallowed up the flood of waters which the dragon has let 
 out of its mouth. The waters are the symbol of a wild 
 and raging world-power, such as the Jews again and again 
 stirred up against the Christians. The dry land, on the 
 other hand, is the symbol of fixed government based on 
 laws and resting on disciplined military strength. We 
 see, then, the sense in which Paul appealed unto Caesar, 
 and the history of spiritual Christianity for eighteen 
 centuries is little else than a repetition of this incident 
 under varying circumstances. It has been the conflict 
 of Caesarism against Clericalism, of Erastianism against 
 Ecclesiasticism, of the Byzantine type of Imperial as- 
 cendancy against the Roman type of Papal or Clerical. 
 In the one case, it has been the State-Church ; in the 
 other, the Church-State. The Imperator of New Rome 
 has claimed to be Pontifex Maximus ; while the Pon- 
 tifex Maximus of Old Rome has retaliated by laying 
 claim to the purple, and, on the credit of forged docu- 
 ments such as the Donation of Constantine and the
 
 TJie Free Church in a Free State. 99 
 
 Decretals of Isidore has laid the foundations of a 
 kingdom which is little else than a parody of the old 
 Imperial rule on a shrunken scale of grandeur. 
 
 It needs but little spiritual discernment to see that 
 the true bride of Christ the spiritual society which He 
 has left on earth as a witness to her unseen and ascended 
 Lord and Master has as little to say to the State- 
 Church on the one hand, as to the Church-State on the 
 other. The Byzantine and the Roman type of theocracy 
 are alike alien to her ; between Erastianism and Ecclesi- 
 asticism she stands, as Paul on Mars' Hill between the 
 Stoics and Epicureans, having as little in common with 
 the self-sufficiency of the one as with the self-pleasing 
 and expediency of the other. All that can be said in 
 excuse for the two systems is, that the one has been 
 raised up to check and neutralise the other; and the 
 error of true Christians has been that, in flying from 
 the one, they should have thrown themselves into the 
 embrace of the other. To use the lively language of 
 the prophet, it has been " as if a man did flee from a 
 lion and a bear met him." The true Church, like the 
 young David, has been delivered alike from the paw of 
 the bear and of the lion. Nothing more distinctly shows 
 how incomplete the Reformation was than this. It was. 
 nothing more than a single stage in advance not a, 
 complete recovery of primitive purity. The Reformers, 
 with scarcely an exception (Hooper in England, Zwingli 
 in Switzerland, and, to some extent, Knox in Scotland, 
 are the only exceptions we can name), set up one form 
 of theocracy to encounter and put down the other. Eras- 
 tianism, or the supremacy of the civil over the spiritual, 
 is said to be of the genius of Protestantism, and this 
 
 72
 
 IOO The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 verdict is true, if we look to the results of the Reforma- 
 tion. The Reformers were in such haste to rear the 
 walls of their spiritual Zion, that they forgot the wise 
 precaution of Nehemiah and Ezra. They made league 
 with one class of enemies of spiritual truth to coun- 
 teract the other. This was Luther's grand mistake in 
 Germany. Finding that some of the petty princes 
 befriended him partly from respect for his convictions, 
 but principally from dislike of the Kaiser, who was a 
 foreigner he put himself and his cause too much under 
 their protection. He was thus led into many incon- 
 sistencies, such as his approving of the double marriage 
 of the Elector of Hesse, and taking the part which he 
 did against the peasants in their rising against their 
 feudal oppressors. This determined the whole course 
 and after-development, not of German Protestantism 
 only, but of the political history of Germany. The 
 supremacy of the Prince in religious affairs, or what has 
 been called Byzantinism, was thus riveted like a yoke 
 round the necks of the German people. The Erastian 
 maxim, Cujus regio, ejus religio, became the law in 
 Germany, and absolutism in its worst and most degraded 
 form, the type of Byzantine Caesarism, has reigned 
 almost without a check down to this day. 
 
 It would lead us too far afield to follow the results of 
 this degraded type of State-Churchism in Germany. 
 But it is not going too far to say that, but for this cor- 
 rupt type of theocracy, in which the king was also high 
 priest, the exact reverse of the Roman theocracy in 
 which the high priest is a prince, we should not have 
 seen that plague of Rationalism which has nearly killed 
 out vital Christianity in Germany. The rise and spread
 
 TJte Free Church in a Free State. 101 
 
 of Rationalism are co-extensive with the erection of 
 Universities planted by the State, and of theological 
 faculties supplied by professors exclusively appointed 
 by the civil power. There is nothing in the German 
 intellect more Rationalistic than in the Scotch or Eng- 
 lish ; but Germany wanted those safeguards, which, to 
 some extent, existed in England, and still more so in 
 Scotland. The Church exercised some control over the 
 Universities with us ; but in Germany it had next to 
 none or, rather, to speak more correctly, Church and 
 Universities were alike under the bureaucracy, and 
 treated alike as branches of the civil service. With us 
 there was a certain Protectorate allowed to the State 
 over religious affairs ; but in Germany the Protectorate 
 was merged in a complete and centralised system of 
 police supervision. Professors and pastors were alike 
 regarded as public officials appointed, paid, and dis- 
 missed at the will of a Minister of Public Worship, who 
 was responsible, not to public opinion, but to an abso- 
 lute Prince, who lived in a little Versailles, and who 
 mimicked the state and pretensions of the King whose 
 maxim was LSEtat c'est moi. 
 
 In this sense, there is great truth in the remark of 
 Vinet: "The Church-State, properly so-called, is an 
 invention of the Reformation, when, afraid of its own 
 principles, it denied it in action after having proclaimed 
 it in words. The Reformation, in separating itself from 
 the Roman Church, which was neither the multitude 
 nor the civil power, was constrained, in order to find a 
 head, to address itself either to the people or the civil 
 power. Its principle would have led it to choose the 
 people, but in general it had not courage for this ; and,
 
 IO2 The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 in order to possess a present and visible authority, it 
 addressed itself to the civil power, of which it made a 
 bishop. Such is the character of State Churches. This 
 may be briefly designated as the Episcopate of the civil 
 Government. Thus, then, the real State Churches are 
 not so old : they only date from the sixteenth century, 
 and may, without doing them injustice, be called abor- 
 tions of Protestantism. For Protestantism, in conse- 
 crating the principle of individuality, pledged itself to a 
 republic, bound itself to liberty ; whereas we see that it 
 weakened and infringed its principle at the very moment 
 of proclaiming it." 
 
 The Reformation in England took the same channel 
 as in Germany, and, under Elizabeth and James, rapidly 
 sank into a kind of modern Byzantinism, in which the 
 Prince was Patriarch or Bishop of Bishops. James I. 
 shrewdly discerned that Presbyterianism was religious 
 Republicanism, and he hated it accordingly, as much 
 for its political as its religious tendencies. Anglicanism^ 
 or a kind of acephalous hierarchy the arrested develop- 
 ment of the hierarchical movement in the fourth century 
 before episcopal monarchy had developed into the impe- 
 rialism of the Papacy was just the instrument which he 
 desired. He found it ready to hand. To make himself 
 a Protestant Pope was an ambition dear to the heart of 
 a Royal pedant, who was nothing if not a theologian. 
 The grotesque part of the affair is, that, having purged 
 himself of one-half of Calvinism, and that its nobler 
 element, he could not shake himself loose from the other 
 element its narrow predestinarianism ; and so he pre- 
 sents the incongruous spectacle in history ludicrous, if 
 not contemptible of a prince putting down Scotch Cal-
 
 77*? Free Church in a Free State. 103 
 
 vinism with one hand, and building it up with the other ; 
 sending his envoys to Dort to spin metaphysical cob- 
 webs with which to catch Remonstrants in Holland, 
 while he was openly persecuting those Independents in 
 England whose theology was entirely in harmony with 
 that of the State Church of Holland. His successor, 
 Charles I., was both more logical and trenchant so 
 trenchant, indeed, that he brought himself and his two 
 chief advisers in Church and State, Strafford and Laud, 
 to the block. His ideas of Protestant Popery were 
 decisive. A list of the Bishops, drawn up for his use by 
 Laud, with the letters O and P Orthodox and Puritan 
 pointed to the only end of such a conflict. Ortho- 
 doxy meant a kind of reproduction of the orthodox 
 Church of the East, with a Caesar for its chief priest, and 
 subjection to this Caesar the one rule of the realm in 
 Church and State. The rebellion was so clearly on his 
 side, that it is a disgrace to history that the phrase 
 should have been used in the other sense, and the ques- 
 tion prejudged in this way. For this the State Church 
 is more responsible even than the servility and prejudice 
 of historians like Clarendon and Hume. The State 
 Church of Charles II.'s day, when it took in hand a 
 revision of the Liturgy, introduced into its Service-book 
 a form of prayer to commemorate the Anglican martyr, 
 which is one of the strangest compounds of prejudice 
 and passion on record. It set apart a day, in its ecclesi- 
 astical calendar, to commemorate the Royal Martyr, and, 
 strange to say, this unauthorised canonisation of Charles 
 came down unchallenged almost to our day. At last it 
 has been removed, with the other two State services, 
 from the Prayer-Book. But the Church which read
 
 IO4 The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 history in this way must expect to be judged for its con- 
 duct. It cannot quietly discard these services out of its 
 public offices, and escape in this way from the conse- 
 quences of its own partisanship. The Church of Rome 
 is, in this respect, to be admired, if not imitated. She, 
 at least, has the courage of her convictions, and does not 
 in one age repudiate her own solemn deliverances in 
 another. But the Church of England, which is better or 
 worse than that of Rome in this respect, is plastic as 
 was the Byzantine Church, of which it is a debased 
 copy. The chief mark of constancy in the State Church 
 of this realm is, that it has faithfully reflected the 
 theological tone and temper of the powers that be 
 with the colour and complexion of the times. We may 
 speak of its Tudor period, of its Stuart and of its Bruns- 
 wick varieties ; and, on closer inspection, we may see 
 that it has varied exactly as the Sovereign. The Church 
 of Charles I. was not that of Charles II. As the first 
 Charles was a better man and a worse king than his son, 
 there was the same contrast between the Churches of the 
 two periods. Laud was a better man than Sheldon, but 
 a worse Church ruler. If William III. had lived long 
 enough, he might have weeded out from the Bench 
 the sacerdotal and non-juror element altogether which 
 came in with the days of Tory reaction under Anne, 
 only to be extinguished by Hoadleyanism and indiffer- 
 entism under George I. To criticise such a Church or 
 write its history is only to write the history of the reigns 
 under which such-and-such Archbishops received their 
 mitres, and were sworn in as members of the Privy 
 Council. Consecration, in fact, during the Hanoverian 
 period, was looked upon as little else than the ceremony
 
 The Free Church in a Free State. 105 
 
 by which ecclesiastical judges were sworn into office. 
 The Bench of Bishops and of Judges were the prizeholders 
 of their respective professions, and the only difference 
 between the two was decidedly in favour of the legal. 
 The bar was an open career ; and Court favour, though it 
 went for much, did not reign supreme in the legal as in 
 the clerical profession. Happily there is in our day a 
 better public opinion at work everywhere, and our 
 Bishops, as a rule, are generally selected for their merits, 
 though there is still room for family influence and Court 
 connection to assert itself. 
 
 Thus the Church of England has been all through its 
 history a faithful reflex of the age itself. We some- 
 times hear the phrase, " an old-fashioned Church-of- 
 England man," as if there were some prisca fides, some 
 deposit of tradition in the Church of this realm, as there 
 is in the Greek and Roman Churches. As for the sen- 
 timent, facts are against it. The non-jurors thought 
 themselves true Church-of-England men, but their 
 school of thought died out in a little schism or sect. 
 Their legitimate successors are the school of the Tracts 
 for the Times, and where that is leading to scarcely 
 admits of a doubt. Its first tendency is towards Dis- 
 establishment, and its end must be absorption in that 
 great maelstrom of priestcraft, whose centre is in Rome. 
 The Church of England, then, only exists, as its 
 Erastian supporter, Dean Stanley, shows, in the Privy 
 Council. Paraphrasing the question, "What is the 
 German Fatherland ? " he shows it is not in the 
 bishops, or in Convocation, or even in Pan-Anglican 
 Councils, that the vital element of the English Church 
 lies. Its pineal gland, if we may borrow a metaphor
 
 106 The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 from the body, is in that meeting point of head and body, 
 the neck of the institution, where a ganglionic knot of 
 ecclesiastical lawyers interpret those Articles which 
 divines, under Royal authority, drew up three centuries 
 ago. 
 
 If this is not modern Byzantinism, then we fail to 
 understand the meaning of words. It is Clericalism 
 controlled by Cassarism, and, as we might expect, the 
 most ardent clericals chafe under the control, and long 
 to break loose. Such, however, is the dislike of Cle- 
 ricalism by our age that it actually favours Caesarism, 
 since it is supposed to keep the former in check. 
 Hence, as the ichneumon was worshipped in Egypt 
 on account of its destroying the eggs of the crocodile, 
 so Caesarism, which, by itself, is as irrational as the 
 Egyptian worship of the cat, is justified in this country 
 on the ground that it restrains Clericalism. But this is 
 short-sighted, as we believe. Left to itself, Clericalism 
 would not really make much way in this country ; it 
 would decline into a sect, and die at last from want of 
 vitality in the robust air of our popular Protestantism. 
 Thus Caesarism and Clericalism at present go hand in 
 hand in the Church of England. Our only hope is, that 
 the evil may produce its own remedy. Tired and worn 
 out by the intolerant pretensions of a sacerdotal sect, 
 the people of England may rise and assert themselves, 
 and sweep away Erastians and Ecclesiastics together. 
 We are out of patience with the way in which Cle- 
 ricals and Caesarists throw the blame on each other. It 
 reminds us of the Jewish fable of the blind man and the 
 lame man, who together robbed an orchard, the lame 
 man plucking the fruit and the blind man lending him a
 
 The Free Church in a Free State. 107 
 
 back by which to reach the bough. They were both 
 to be beaten with rods, and, to make the punishment 
 more impressive, it was in the same way that the crime 
 was committed that the retribution came. So it is with 
 the Pharisees of the Church, who throw the blame on 
 State control, and the Herodians, who retaliate that but 
 for sacerdotalism, the nation would long since have 
 passed an Act of Comprehension as a sequel to the Act 
 of Toleration. Both are right and both are wrong 
 right in what they assert of their rivals, wrong in what 
 they say in their own excuse. 
 
 The inference is, that the only remedy is in a com- 
 plete destruction of this Caesaro-Clerisy. The only way 
 to destroy it is, as in chemistry, to set up a new affinity 
 to draw off the Erastian party in one direction, and the 
 Ecclesiastical in another. If we completely secularise 
 the one and leave the other a sacerdotal sect, we shall 
 put an end to this dangerous compound the State 
 Church which is an explosive element in modern 
 society. There will be a struggle, and it will cost 
 much effort to do this. The roots of the system are 
 deep down in the soil. The very corruptions of the 
 Church are among its strong points. Its law of lay 
 patronage, and the way in which the purchase system, 
 intolerable now in the army, is tolerated still in the 
 Church, enlists a host of supporters for such an institution 
 among the upper and privileged classes. The question of 
 Disestablishment is fast becoming one of the lower and 
 middle stratum of society against the upper. In favour 
 of the State Church there is the entire weight of the 
 Court, the peerage, the landed proprietary, and the 
 plutocracy, with a few insignificant exceptions. It is
 
 io8 The Free Church in a Free State. 
 
 not probable that with our existing House of Commons 
 this will be effected ; but it will fare differently when 
 the working-man's candidate and the agricultural 
 labourer's representative sit side by side on back 
 benches in the House of Commons, and begin to watch 
 and control the votes of the governing classes. 
 
 Then the Caesaro-Clerical Church of England will 
 go to pieces, and we shall see Cavour's sentiment modi- 
 fied into a federation of Free Churches in a Free State. 
 One Free Church might be a menace to liberty ; not so 
 with a federation of churches loosely cohering together, 
 and acting on each other in a spirit of healthy rivalry. 
 American voluntaryism has its own faults, but they are 
 those of human nature, and if it is not the Millennium 
 we could wish for, it is a decided advance to the stage 
 of perfect liberty of thought and opinion, essential to 
 the life of a spiritual religion.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE THREE EVILS OF THE ENGLISH 
 ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 PASSING on from the general course of Church history, 
 let us glance at the special features of the English 
 Church Establishment. No other National Church in 
 Europe presents us in the same way with the two ten- 
 dencies of authority and of private judgment the 
 Catholic and the Protestant, as we commonly call them 
 so intimately linked together, and acting and reacting 
 on each other. Here, if anywhere, Church principles 
 may be studied, and the efforts of State Churchism, for 
 better and worse, seen to the greatest advantage. 
 
 It has been said by modern apologists for the Estab- 
 lishment that it is an unfounded assertion that the 
 State at some time agreed to set up and establish one 
 particular Church ; that, setting out from the abstract 
 principle that it is the duty of the State to maintain a 
 religion, it went on to pronounce which form of religion it 
 should be; and that finally, out of a number of contending 
 sects, it came to a kind of judgment of Paris, assigning 
 the golden apple of supremacy to the Episcopal Church. 
 We admit that if the opponents of Establishments were 
 to argue in this unhistorical way, it would be easy for 
 professors of history to point out their mistakes. But
 
 no The Three Evils of 
 
 this is the common case of a caricature. A writer is 
 represented as saying something supremely ridiculous, 
 and then he is refuted out of premises which have been 
 laid down for him by another. Instead of unfair argu- 
 ments of this kind, let us meet these professors of history 
 on their own ground, and point out the gradual stages in 
 which a State Establishment of religion grew up in this 
 country as in the rest of Europe. By limiting our point 
 of view to our own country, we shall better understand 
 the course of events elsewhere. 
 
 So far from saying that the State entered into an 
 alliance with the Church at any particular point in 
 the history of either, it would be more correct to say 
 that all modern civilisation is Christian. The result is, 
 that the State grew up under the shadow of the Church, 
 not the Church under the shadow of the State. The 
 course of history is traced, not by the approach and 
 ultimate alliance of two independent bodies, but con- 
 versely in the gradual assertion by the State first, of its 
 own sovereignty, and then of its supremacy over the 
 Church, and, lastly, in our day, of its entire neutrality 
 and indifference to it. Thus the three stages of English 
 history are marked by a Pope's Church claiming a cer- 
 tain supremacy over the State ; a King's Church, in which 
 the tables are turned, and the supremacy is that of the 
 State over the Church ; and, lastly, a People's Church, 
 in which the supremacy lies with the people at large, 
 and is localised in each congregation, not centralised, as 
 at present, in the Crown and Parliament. 
 
 This is the true course of development. It falls in 
 with, and corresponds to, Herbert Spencer's law of 
 evolution, in which societies, like organisms, are simple
 
 The English Establishment. in 
 
 at first, and become complicated as civilisation advances. 
 In the earliest state of society, the legislative and the 
 executive are one ; the King and his Council advise, and 
 then put their own decisions into execution. It is for 
 rulers to command, and for people the simple duty is to 
 obey. Then, as civilisation advances, the ruling power 
 separates out into three distinct branches the execu- 
 tive, the legislative, and the judicial. On the complete 
 independence of these three elements of the sovereignty, 
 the stability of a country depends. We may measure 
 the growth of civilisation by the recognition of this 
 principle of the interdependence, as well as strict sub- 
 ordination, of these branches of the constitutional tree. 
 Civilisation is the evolution of structural variety out of 
 simplicity. A rude and primitive society is like a twig 
 one single shoot out of the ground. But an advanced 
 and civilised society is like a tree, where from one root 
 there are many branches, and these boughs so wide- 
 spreading that they may be broken off without endan- 
 gering the life of the tree. Thus, in the civilisation of a 
 tribal state of society like that of the Saxons in Britain 
 twelve centuries ago, it is absurd to speak of the alliance 
 of Church and State. The question even of the supre- 
 macy, or which is king in Britain the Pope or the 
 Basileus or Bretwalda had not yet arisen. Both 
 claims slept in the bosom of a yet ungrown society, as 
 the peculiarities and distinctions of sex sleep in the 
 new-born infant, or the music of the moon in the plain 
 brown egg of the nightingale. 
 
 A French writer has described the growth of modern 
 society as born sur les genoux de Veglise. So far from 
 the State having been the nursing father of the Church,
 
 U2 The Three Evils of 
 
 the very reverse is the case. All our modern institu- 
 tions have grown up under the shadow of the Church. 
 It would be ungrateful not to admit this. But while we 
 owe a debt of acknowledgment for what the Church did 
 in the past, we have a duty to discharge for the present 
 and with a view to the future. Progress is marked by 
 the law of evolution. The State grows into an institu- 
 tion, having laws of its own. Take the judicial, for 
 instance. During the Saxon period, the Court of the 
 Hundred holds ecclesiastical as well as civil pleas. The 
 Bishop sits as assessor with the Eaorlderman or Sheriff 
 in the Court of the County. During the Norman period, 
 the law authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, separate, and 
 each takes its own course. They enter into a struggle 
 with each other, which is not finally settled until the 
 Reformation, when the supremacy of the Crown is 
 asserted once and for ever, and the Canon or Pope's law 
 has to become the Crown law. The same course of 
 emancipation of the State from the Church is to be 
 traced in the progress of education. The Universities 
 were nothing but Church schools, and when we inquire 
 how it came about that the Colleges at last over- 
 shadowed the University, the explanation is, that the 
 Colleges represented the regular clergy, which, in the 
 thirteenth century, completely eclipsed the secular. 
 The Colleges bore the same relation to the Universities 
 as the monastic system in general to the diocesan and 
 episcopal form of Church government. It is true that 
 when the Papacy could not control the two orders of 
 mendicant and preaching friars which overran Europe 
 in the thirteenth century, it wisely resolved to utilise 
 their zeal to reduce to obedience those other children of
 
 TJie English Establishment. 1 1 3 
 
 the Church more unruly than they were. In this it 
 acted on the same astute policy as Henry VII., who 
 sent over as his deputy to Ireland Silken Thomas, the 
 Lord Kildare, saying, " Since all Ireland cannot control 
 him, he shall control all Ireland." In the same way, the 
 Papacy converted the Orders into a body of Janissaries 
 by which it hoped to regain the spiritual allegiance of 
 Europe, which it had nearly lost under its schisms and 
 the rivalries of disputed elections to the Papacy. It 
 was in this way that, as the Orders springing up out 
 of finally succeeded in mastering the Church, so the 
 Colleges outgrew the Universities, and almost asserted 
 their independence of them. These monastic institu- 
 tions, which grew up in gremio Universitatis, were as 
 undutiful as modern society itself, which has been 
 nursed sur les genoux de Vtglise, only to rebel against its 
 mother. In any case, the course of modern progress 
 has been the same, whether in the Courts of Law, at the 
 Universities, and throughout society. It has been the 
 liberation, not so much of the Church from State 
 control and patronage, as of the State from Church 
 control and patronage. The history of the relations of 
 Church and State has thus been not unlike the rivalry 
 between Jacob and Esau. The younger brother, the 
 supplanter, obtains both birthright and blessing, and 
 the elder serves the younger. So in the same way, Hel- 
 lenism, or secular society, is made to serve under 
 Hebraism, or ecclesiastical, all through the Middle 
 Ages. But at the Renaissance and the Reformation the 
 tables were turned. Hellenism, like Esau, has the domi- 
 nion, and breaks the yoke from off its neck. The State 
 was subject to the Church during the Middle Ages ; 
 
 8
 
 114 The Three Evils of 
 
 the Church has been subject to the State for the three 
 centuries since the Reformation. Perhaps in both cases 
 we should not be ignorant concerning this mystery ; 
 that, as Jew and Gentile, according to the apostle, have 
 alternately ruled and served, so Hebraism and Hellen- 
 ism, or Church and State, culture and Christianity, the 
 spiritual and the secular, have alternately played the part 
 of tyrant and slave. It is intended that by-and-by they 
 may see that their true relation is one not of competition 
 for the mastery, but of kindly co-operation. They are 
 not to be organised into one compacted system, but to 
 interact on each other as light, heat, and electricity do 
 in nature. 
 
 It would clear up much confusion of thought on the 
 subject of the alliance of Church and State if we would 
 "bear in mind that as institutions grow, so our ideas of 
 them are insensibly modified. We forget that we can- 
 not look back at the England of the ninth century, and 
 see it with the same eyes as the men of that age did. 
 We insensibly assume that their point of view was ours, 
 and that if Church and State were united then, it was 
 "because statesmen and Churchmen both wished to unite 
 them ; whereas the real state of the case is that their 
 union arose from the simple and homogeneous state of 
 society. Religion, morality, and law, as Professor 
 Stubbs observes, seem to be regarded throughout the 
 period as much the same thing.* The principle stated 
 by Tacitus, that among the ancient Germans good 
 morals were of more avail than good laws are else- 
 where, "plus ibi boni mores valent quam alibi bones 
 leges" The relation of the Church to the State was 
 * Vide Stubbs' Constitutional History, Vol. I., p. 234.
 
 The English Establishment. 115 
 
 thus close, although there was not the least confusion as 
 to the organisation of the functions, or uncertainty as 
 to the limits of the power of each. It was a state of 
 things which could only exist in a race that was entirely 
 homogeneous, and becoming conscious of political 
 unity. 
 
 The law of development is, in fact, the key to this 
 question of Church and State in England as elsewhere. 
 As society grew and became more complicated, Church 
 and State assumed each its own jurisdiction. They 
 were at first one, as children laid in the same cradle and 
 growing up in the same nursery. Next they were united 
 as man and woman are when fully grown and prepared 
 for entering into that partnership for life which we call 
 marriage. The third state of their evolution is when 
 this union or alliance is found to lead to contentions as 
 to the supremacy, and when, to use Cecil's illustration 
 to Elizabeth, two cannot ride on horseback without one 
 sitting behind. This is the stage in which we are at pre- 
 sent. The State is in the saddle, the Church on the 
 pillion behind. But there remains a fourth and the 
 final stage, when Church and State shall alike feel that 
 they have outgrown the nursery and the partnership 
 stage of alliance, and when each must take its own 
 course separate from the other. To this all things point 
 at present. 
 
 If we were to mark out the epochs of English history 
 corresponding to these several stages, we should say that 
 England was in the first stage down to the time of the 
 Norman Conquest. Hooker's theory of the identity of 
 Church and State is an utter anachronism now, and it was 
 partially so in Hooker's day ; but it expressed as fairly 
 
 82
 
 Ii6 The Three Evils of 
 
 as any theory can the facts of the case in the Anglo- 
 Saxon period of English history. Bishop and Earl then 
 sat in the same County Court. There was scarcely any 
 distinction between civil and religious offences all 
 crimes were alike against God, the King, and the Church 
 But with the Norman Conquest an important change is 
 apparent. The most important measure of the reign of 
 the Conqueror, as Mr. Stubbs has remarked, was the 
 separation of the Church jurisdiction from the secular 
 business of the Courts of Law, and is, unfortunately, 
 like all other charters of the time, undated.* Its con- 
 tents, however, show the influence of the ideas which, 
 under the genius of Hildebrand, were forming the cha- 
 racter of the Continental Churches. From henceforth 
 the Bishops and Archdeacons were no longer to hold 
 ecclesiastical pleas in the Hundred Court, but to have 
 Courts of their own to try causes by canonical, not by 
 customary, law ; and allow no spiritual questions to 
 come before laymen as judges. In case of contumacy, 
 the offender may be excommunicated, and the King or 
 Sheriff will enforce the punishment. In the same way, 
 laymen are forbidden to interfere in spiritual causes. 
 The reform is one which might very naturally recom- 
 mend itself to a man like Lanfranc. The system which 
 it superseded was full of anomalies and disadvantages 
 both to justice and religion. But the change involved 
 far more than appeared at first. The growth of the 
 Canon law in the succeeding century from a quantity 
 of detached local or occasional rules to a great body of 
 universal authoritative jurisprudence, arranged and 
 digested by scholars who were beginning to reap the 
 * Vide Stubbs' Constitutional History, Vol. I., p. 283.
 
 The English Establishment. 117 
 
 advantages of a revived study of the Roman civil law 
 gave to the clergy generally a far more distinctive and 
 definite civil status than they had ever possessed before, 
 and drew into Church Courts a mass of business with 
 which the Church previously had only an indirect con- 
 nection. The question of investitures, the marriage of 
 the clergy, and the crying prevalence of simony within 
 a very few years of the Conqueror's death, forced on the 
 minds of statesmen everywhere the necessity of some 
 uniform system of law. The need of a system of law 
 once felt, the recognition of the supremacy of the 
 Papal Court as a tribunal of appeal followed of course, 
 and with it the great extension of the Legatine admini- 
 stration. The clergy thus found themselves in a 
 position external, if they chose to regard it so, to the 
 common law of the land able to claim exemption from 
 the temporal tribunals, and by appeals to Rome to para- 
 lyse the regular jurisdiction of the diocesans. Disorder 
 followed on disorder, and the anarchy of Stephen's 
 reign, in which every secular abuse was paralleled or 
 reflected in an ecclesiastical one, prepared the way for 
 the constitutions of Clarendon, and the struggle that 
 followed, with all its results, down to the Reformation 
 itself. The same facility of employing the newly- 
 developed jurisprudence of the canonists drew into the 
 Ecclesiastical Courts the matrimonial and testamentary 
 jurisdiction, and that most mischievous, because most 
 abused, system of enforcing moral discipline by spiritual 
 penalties at the instance of men whose first object was 
 the accumulation of money. 
 
 The able writer from whom we have quoted the 
 above has observed with great truth that the his-
 
 Ii8 The Three Evils of 
 
 tory of institutions cannot be mastered, can scarcely 
 be approached, without an effort. True as this is 
 of civil, it is especially true of ecclesiastical insti- 
 tutions, whose origin is partly secular, partly spiritual. 
 The Church enters into conflict with the State 
 like those heroes of Homer who are demigods the 
 child of a mortal and an immortal. Achilles, when 
 wronged by Agamemnon, does not redress his wrongs or 
 revenge them as one man with another. He complains 
 to his mother, Thetis, and thus brings the gods down 
 into the conflict. In the same way, the Church of the 
 Middle Ages fought for a carnal prize the dominion of 
 men's conscience with spiritual weapons, the fear of 
 the unseen world and its powers ; and the result was 
 that in many cases, though not in all, she prevailed as 
 Achilles did over Agamemnon. But the result was a 
 revolt, not merely against Rome, but against the intole- 
 rable tyranny of the subjection of the laity to the clergy. 
 It was the clerical courts, more even than the Papacy 
 itself, which brought on the Reformation in England. 
 The first act, then, of the Reformation, and the key- 
 stone of the whole, was the Act of Supremacy and the 
 enforced submission of the clergy to the civil power. 
 Convocation silenced or reduced to a mere assembly for 
 voting supplies, and the Bishops' Ecclesiastical Courts 
 reduced from courts of record to the mere registry of 
 wills and marriages, the subjection of the Church to the 
 State was nearly complete ; and what Henry began 
 Elizabeth carried still farther. She claimed, and all but 
 exercised, the right of deposing as well as of making 
 bishops. Consecration was a mere ceremony carried 
 out under a Royal order, equivalent to a patent. In
 
 The English Establishment. 119 
 
 every act and relation of life, the clergy were made to 
 feel that the Church was the second, not the first. The 
 iron entered into their soul, and the little finger of the 
 Royal supremacy which was near was thicker than the 
 loins of the Papal supremacy which was far off. 
 
 It was in this way and by these means that our much- 
 lauded National Church arose. It was national, it is 
 true, in the sense that its tyrant was a Tudor, not a 
 Farnese or a Medici ; but as for liberty, either of self- 
 government or growth from within, there was none. 
 The rule cujus regio, ejus religio, which we think so de- 
 grading in Germany, and which only grew up there into 
 a maxim of State after the Peace of Westphalia in 
 1648, was acted on in the most unblushing manner in 
 this country a century before. Under Henry VIII., 
 the Church was tossed violently, like a ball, between 
 Lutheran and Catholic formulas, according as the King's 
 mind wavered. When he reformed, it reformed ; as he 
 relapsed, it relapsed ; and sturdy old Latimer seems to 
 have been almost the only prelate who dared even to 
 comment on this "mingle-mangle or hotch-potch," as 
 he called it, of old and new doctrine. It is not sur- 
 prising if there were many vicars of Bray. The Bishops 
 were, in too many cases, mere trimmers, and Cranmer 
 the most disgraceful of all, whose death scarcely re- 
 deems a career of pliable courtiership, in which he 
 seems to be only a debased Wolsey, a Ximenes without 
 his greatness. This taint of Erastianism which came in 
 with the Reformation has never been purged out of the 
 English Church. It is, in fact, the most Erastian Church 
 in Christendom, not excepting even those of Germany, 
 where Erastianism arose, and where it was hurled as
 
 I2o The Three Evils of 
 
 a term of reproach by Calvinists against Lutherans. 
 The Calvinistic Churches, to their honour be it said, have 
 always resisted this taint of secularism more steadily 
 than the Lutheran ; but no Church on the Continent, 
 Lutheran or Calvinist, has ever submitted to the yoke of 
 Royal supremacy so slavishly as the English. It has 
 even gloried in its shame, and all that it means by call- 
 ing itself national is, that it is anti-Papal. It is not 
 national in any other sense. It has never reflected the 
 religious feeling of the great mass of the people. It has 
 been at one time a Crown Church, and, under the Stuarts, 
 the servile supporter of the Prerogative. Later on, it was 
 the Church of the Peerage and the privileged classes, as 
 Warburton describes it in his day ; and latterly it has 
 become the Church of the Plutocracy, and finds its chief 
 supporters among the newly-risen moneyed classes, who 
 use it as the readiest passport into good society. Its 
 very corruptions, of which the purchase system is the 
 most glaring, are, in fact, the secret of its strength 
 among that class. The attempt to remove this scandal 
 of the sale of livings (euphemiously, it is only the ad- 
 vowson or right to appoint which is the matter of sale) 
 has been dealt with very cautiously by the Bishop of 
 Peterborough ; but it has failed, as all who know the 
 strength of these vested interests knew it would. In 
 fact, the Church of England is, for better or worse, what 
 the eighth Henry made and left it. It has ceased to be 
 the Pope's Church, but it is not the People's Church. It 
 is still, as it has always been, the Church of the Crown 
 and the upper classes, and, as long as their influence is 
 predominant, it will continue to exist on its present 
 foundations. When, for any reason, the balance of
 
 The English Establishment. 121 
 
 power is transferred from the upper to the lower section 
 of the middle classes, then it will fall from the with- 
 drawal of its natural supports in the privileged classes, 
 and, above all, in the plutocracy. 
 
 Applying, then, the law of evolution to the English 
 Church, we cannot admit as Mr. Freeman assumes, that 
 since she was not set up and established at any one point 
 in her history, that for this reason she ought not to be 
 disestablished. Our argument is, that the Church, in the 
 estate of prelacy, grew in this country and extended its 
 powers side by side with those of the Prerogative. 
 During the Saxon period, which was the infancy of our 
 constitution, Church and State grew up side by side. 
 There was no thought of union or even of rivalry. The 
 law of differentiation had not begun to divide and dis- 
 tinguish between the provinces of the secular and the 
 sacred. One law, as in the Mosaic polity and that of 
 Mahomet, covered all cases. The distinction of later 
 times into canon and civil law was unknown. With the 
 Norman Conquest and the rise of the Papacy under 
 Hildebrand, which was coeval with it, the distinction of 
 Church and State begins to emerge. The two are allied, 
 as the two swords given to Peter, as the sun and moon 
 of the political firmament ; but there is room for rivalry, 
 and a contention, accordingly, for supremacy begins. On 
 this contention the history of the Middle Ages mainly 
 turns. All the strife about investitures is nothing else 
 than the result of the consciousness that Church and 
 State had entered into partnership and afterwards dis- 
 puted for the mastery. At the Reformation we reach 
 the third stage of this long process of evolution and 
 differentiation. The State has now grown, and by the
 
 122 The Three Evils of 
 
 law of specialisation has branched out, into a constitu- 
 tion, with an Executive and a Judicature. Slowly the 
 professions law, physic, and divinity have broken off 
 from each other, and each has taken its own line of 
 study, and holds property under distinct charters. 
 Then army and navy, in the same way, have become 
 distinct branches of our national defences. Endless 
 are the ramifications and subdivisions to which this 
 specialising tendency has progressed, and is progressing 
 still. We may trace it in the history of our Poor-law. At 
 first it is a benevolence collected by churchwardens and 
 placed in a basin every Sunday on the altar ; it is then 
 a rate ; and, in the last stage of all, we have guardians, 
 unions, a Poor-law Board, and all traces of its original 
 religious use have disappeared. The same order of 
 emancipation of the State from Church control and 
 patronage is going on everywhere. The monk's hood on 
 the graduate's shoulders, the coif on the serjeant-at-law's 
 wig, alike point to clerical traditions which long clung 
 to our Inns of Court. This tendency to differentiation, 
 which is the law of growth in the physical world, is also 
 the law in the political. It explains what some call an 
 advance and others a decline from primitive ideals, but 
 which all admit is inevitable the slow and final separa- 
 tion of Church and State. As in physiology organ and 
 function are correlates, and as we rise in the scale so 
 organs increase in complexity and functions differ pro- 
 portionably, so it is in the body politic. It is not one 
 member, but many ; and the more advanced our civi- 
 lisation, the more entirely the functions of the spiritual 
 break away from those of the secular. 
 
 Thus, as the pre-Reformation age marked the subjec-
 
 The English Establishment. 12 3 
 
 tion of the State to the Church, and the post-Reforma- 
 tion the subjection of the Church to the State, there 
 only remains that we should now fall back on the pri- 
 mary relation of all, which is that of the isolation of 
 Church and State. We must leave the Church to act on 
 the world, not as an organised body in alliance with, and 
 more or less in dependence on, the State, but as a purely 
 spiritual system, acting on society as the leaven hid in 
 the three measures of meal. It is by chemical affinity, 
 not by mechanical incorporation, with the State, that 
 Christianity is to act on the age in the future. This 
 is the Reformation of the future ; but, to attain this, we 
 must break up the existing Establishment. No mere 
 reform of abuses will suffice when the institution itself 
 is little more than a compromise between Caesarism and 
 Clericalism* Attack the clerical element, and it takes 
 refuge in its Erastian tendencies as subject to the State. 
 On the other hand, attack its Erastianism, and it de- 
 fends itself as a great spiritual society resting on the 
 apostolical succession. 
 
 Let us notice in order some of these evils. 
 
 I. The first of the evils of State connection, though 
 not the greatest, is Prelacy. By this we mean the 
 arrangement which elevates the highest class of Church 
 officers into Peers of Parliament, and by attaching 
 baronies to their sees converts them into great officers 
 of State. Into the constitutional argument for such an 
 arrangement we need not here enter. It is obvious that 
 it grew out of the necessities of the case in early times, 
 and that when a Norman King summoned his great 
 vassals and those who held in capite of the King to a 
 Council of State, he should summon Bishops and
 
 124 The Three Evils of 
 
 Abbots who held lands, the investiture to which was 
 jealously claimed as a Royal Prerogative. In these 
 times not to summon the Bishops and great Abbots 
 would have been to admit that they held these lands 
 otherwise than of the Crown ; and knowing that the 
 dispute as to investitures was the key to the contro- 
 versies between the Crown and the Pope all over 
 Europe, the summoning of Bishops to sit in Parliament 
 as Barons was the reverse of a privilege. It was a dig- 
 nity they would have been only too happy to dispense 
 with. So difficult is it to throw ourselves back into 
 former times, that we are in danger of regarding the 
 Baronial Bishop of the age of the Edwards as the 
 special mark of the Crown's favour. The very reverse 
 was the case. The jealousy of the Church was extreme 
 on the part of the Crown. Every effort was made to 
 curtail their independence, and one of the means 
 adopted to rivet the yoke of the Royal supremacy 
 round their neck was thus to summon them to Parlia- 
 ment. Those Abbots only escaped whose lands were 
 held by some base tenure. The Bishops and greater 
 Abbots would have readily consented to be exempted 
 from this feudal burden of attending Parliament. The 
 clergy were regarded as a caste by themselves, with their 
 own Convocation, in which they voted the supplies re- 
 quired by the Crown from them as a separate Estate of 
 the Realm. It was not till a century after the Reforma- 
 tion that Convocation consented to surrender its right 
 to a separate taxation of the clergy. Though in a 
 sense, then, the Church of England was constituted in 
 the " Estate of Prelacy " long before the Reformation, 
 Prelacy, in the modern sense of the word, as an excep-
 
 The English Establishment. 125 
 
 tional privilege of one order of the clergy, only dates 
 from the power of Parliament to control the Crown. 
 We may fix that date from the meeting of the Long 
 Parliament under Charles I. Hence it is that Milton 
 strikes at Prelacy so fiercely as the blackest feature in 
 the Church of England of that day. In the narrow 
 and intolerant mind of Laud, Prelacy had shaped itself 
 into a new engine of oppression to restrain the rising 
 liberties of the people, and to check the growth of the 
 Constitution. The Prerogative, in spite of all the 
 extravagant assertion of the Stuarts and their Court 
 flatterers, was really weak in England. Without a 
 standing army, and with no fixed revenue and no 
 means of extracting it except by a vote of Parliament, 
 the Stuarts might have clung to the fiction of the 
 Divine right of kings, and the pretension would have 
 been as powerless in Charles' hands as it had been in 
 those of his father. Unfortunately for the King and 
 his cause, he found an ally in Laud willing to do the 
 work of Thorough with all Strafford's daring, but with 
 a subtlety which Strafford never could descend to. Pre- 
 lacy, in a word, was the engine used by Laud, as a 
 standing army trained in the Irish wars was the instru- 
 ment on which Straffbrd relied. Laud's idea of Prelacy 
 was probably that of the great Cardinals Ximenes and 
 Wolsey. He was not a mere statesman in cassock like 
 the French Cardinals Mazarin, Richelieu, and Fleury, who 
 ruled under weak kings like Louis XIII. and Louis XV. 
 His ambition, probably, went further than theirs. He 
 dreamed of turning the tables on the State, and using 
 the Royal supremacy to reverse the subjection of the 
 clergy to the laity, which had been riveted by the Act
 
 126 The Three Evils of 
 
 of Submission of 1532. Much as Laud extolled the 
 Royal Prerogative, he was no mere courtier like Williams 
 and Mainwaring. He had vaster schemes behind, and 
 probably meant to use Charles as a puppet much as 
 Mazarin and Richelieu had done in France, only for 
 different ends. Their minds were essentially political ; 
 his was ecclesiastical through and through. Hence it is 
 that Milton and the Puritans came to hate Prelacy 
 with such peculiar intensity. To them it was the repre- 
 sentative of a hateful combination of reaction, civil and 
 religious. It concentrated in itself all that was illiberal 
 and anti-popular in Church and State. It is true that 
 this type of Prelacy has never reappeared in the Eng- 
 lish Church. Laud was the last of the prelates or 
 prince-bishops, in the active and mischievous sense of 
 the word. When the phrase has been applied to a 
 Bishop Barrington of Durham, or a Bishop Sumner of 
 Winchester, it has meant nothing more than that an 
 amiable and courtly divine was the fortunate holder of 
 overgrown revenues in the Church. A nineteenth cen- 
 tury prelate is a peer with an establishment on a some- 
 what reduced scale, who, much against his will, has to 
 put on lawn sleeves when he sits in the House of Lords, 
 and who lives in a second-rate country-house, which, 
 unfortunately for him, is misnamed a palace. To these 
 modest dimensions has Prelacy shrunk in our days. 
 Whether as the spiritualty they are of much use to the 
 order of temporal peers among whom they are supposed 
 to mix, we have never been able to gather from the ad- 
 missions of peers themselves. As to Burke's rhetorical 
 phrase about religion raising her mitred front in the 
 homes of kings and nobles, facts decidedly bear in the
 
 The English Establishment. 127 
 
 opposite direction. The upper classes, if they want 
 spiritual consolation at all, generally seek it, as all other 
 people do, from some godly minister whom they respect 
 for his own sake, not for any official rank which he 
 happens to hold in the Church. As a matter of fact, 
 men of rank rather dislike a successful Churchman, and 
 his spiritual peerage is no commendation to him in the 
 eyes of the class of hereditary peers. Prelacy, then, is 
 an institution which is dying a lingering death. As it 
 exists in this country, it is little more than a harmless 
 survival of a state of society which has disappeared. It 
 only creates a smile when the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury claims that he holds a kind of midway position in 
 the State as a great statesman as well as a Churchman. 
 Thus it is that the attempt to conserve the old prin- 
 ciple of a dominant Church by giving it an air of com- 
 prehension which cannot belong to it defeats itself, and 
 we fall back on the position that the only solution of 
 the question is, to throw the region of spiritual beliefs 
 open and unenclosed a kind of ager publicus or 
 folkland, to be enjoyed in common by all, the only 
 interference on the part of the State being to protect 
 the rights of all in its equal enjoyment 
 
 II. Another evil of the English State Church, for 
 which there is no remedy but disestablishment, is the 
 patronage system, with the corresponding abuses of 
 the purchase of livings. Into the history of this ques- 
 tion we need not enter. Abuses have generally, if not 
 always, an historical rise in the dim past, and they hide 
 their sources, as great rivers do, in distant and ill- 
 explored mountain regions. The feudal lord who 
 created a benefice by bestowing certain lands and
 
 128 The Three Evils of 
 
 paying tithes of his own and his tenants' produce, at 
 first as a voluntary and afterwards as a compulsory tax, 
 naturally acquired the patronage of the benefice, and so 
 became the advocatus of the living, which in course of 
 time became his advocatio hence the word advowson. 
 All this is only what we might expect from the nature of 
 the case, and, being in harmony with the ideas of the age, 
 no special abuse grew out of it at first. But, as time 
 went on, as the feudal system died out, and the 
 modern proprietary system of holding land took its 
 place, manors changed hands, and so manorial rights 
 came into the market. Ecclesiastical patronage being 
 one of these manorial rights, it, too, became a matter 
 of barter and sale. At first these rights were appen- 
 dant, and such rights were conveyed with the manor as 
 incident thereto by a grant of the manor, only without 
 adding any other words. But where the property of the 
 advowson has been once separated from the property of 
 the manor by legal conveyance, it is then an advowson 
 in gross, and is annexed to the person of the owner, 
 and not to his manor or lands. Many reforms have 
 been suggested for this abuse of patronage, but they all 
 fall short of the true point of efficacy. The only remedy 
 is to lay the axe at the root of the tree of patronage 
 altogether, and restore to the gemeinde, or commune, or 
 congregation of Christian men, their ancient right to call 
 their own minister. It has been conceded in Scotland 
 by a Conservative Ministry, who have shown the wisdom 
 which consists in locking the stable-door when the steed 
 is stolen. In Scotland, where the abuses of patronage 
 were infinitesimally small, but the resistance to it stern 
 and unyielding there politicians have conceded the
 
 The English Establishment, 129 
 
 point ; whereas in England, where the evils are crying, 
 but the resistance languid on account of those who ob- 
 ject having long since seceded in that case no attempt 
 at reform has been made. We can account for this on 
 the principle that politicians move on the line of least 
 resistance. Where the reform is easy and the demand 
 for it loud, there they yield without much pressure ; 
 where, on the other hand, the reform is troublesome and 
 the demand for it not so pronounced, in that case they 
 hold back, and wait for pressure from without before 
 they move at all. In the case of the English Church, 
 it is clear that lay patronage and the purchase of livings 
 having been so long recognised by law, the remedy will 
 not be so simple as in the case of Scotland. There is no 
 solution of the question but one, which is, to invest the 
 parishioners with the freehold of their own church and 
 its ecclesiastical revenues, and to create a corporation 
 aggregate of the parish to succeed to the rights of the 
 corporation sole on the next avoidance of the benefice. 
 In that case the parishioners will have to deal with the 
 patron, and to compensate him for the loss of his rights 
 of presentation. This they could do by a charge on 
 the revenues of the parish. After that lay patrons 
 have been compensated in this way, the surplus might 
 be applied to educational purposes, or some such similar 
 object on which the parish should agree. Into the de- 
 tails of this scheme for extinguishing lay patronage, we 
 do not intend to enter here. They have been clearly 
 and lucidly brought out by Mr. Hopgood in a pamphlet 
 lately reprinted from the Contemporary Review* But 
 
 * Disestablishment and Disendowment of the English Church. Re- 
 printed from the Contemporary Review. With Introductory Remarks by 
 James Hopgood. Williams and Norgate. 1875. 
 
 9
 
 130 The Three Evils of 
 
 the point we wish to enforce is this, that there can be no 
 reform of Church patronage in this country on any other 
 terms than total disestablishment. It is not to be sup- 
 posed that patrons are going to surrender their rights to 
 the people, and to step aside even with compensation, 
 in order to see a scheme of endowed Congregationalism 
 take the place of the existing system. The Church will 
 either continue on her present foundations, or move off 
 altogether and become a free and people's Church. But 
 she cannot halt at some half-way house, and carry out her 
 endowments with her into the open air of voluntaryism. 
 Prelacy, patronage, and the purchase system, have grown 
 up together in that exclusive aristocratical state of 
 society in which the Church has lived and moved and 
 had its being ever since the Reformation. They must all 
 stand or fall together. We have seen from an historical 
 survey of the English Church that it always has re- 
 flected the state of society of the age in which it either 
 took a fresh shape or made a new point of departure. 
 During the Middle Ages it became a Papal Church, be- 
 cause the Papacy was then the great paramount power in 
 Europe and the visible centre of union in Christendom. 
 At the Reformation it took a fresh point of departure, 
 and, with the supremacy of the Crown over the Pope, the 
 Church became an Erastianised Establishment, which, 
 as Vinet well remarks, was one of the results of the 
 Reformation all over Europe. In our day, the principle 
 of the supremacy of conscience has asserted itself at 
 last, not as a mere barren formula, but as a point of 
 departure for religious organisation. Spiritual truth 
 is at last being left to its own free development, and men 
 are left to aggregate themselves religiously in what con-
 
 The English Establishment. 131 
 
 federation they please, uncontrolled by any authority, 
 secular or ecclesiastical. This brings us to the sect 
 principle of religion, which, no doubt, is only a transition 
 to a higher and more universal Church of the future. 
 Still, to attain this, we must be prepared to pay the 
 price, and to accept the break-up of our existing organi- 
 sations as the only way of reaching it. The English 
 Church is an anachronism as it is ; it represents nothing 
 but a survival of obsolete ideas of Churchmen who 
 were also great officers of State, and of public men who 
 in return undertook to regulate the Church. Prelacy, or 
 the intrusion of ecclesiastics into worldly affairs, and 
 patronage, or the assumption of one lay person to 
 appoint a teacher for a whole community these cor- 
 relative evils of Clericalism and of Caesarism arose 
 together, and can be reformed only in one way, by 
 leaving religion to the free action of the individual con- 
 science, and by reducing to a minimum the corporate 
 idea of Church authority. 
 
 92
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SCEPTICISM AND SUPERSTITION THE OUT- 
 GROWTH OF STATE -CHURCHISM. 
 
 WE have shown that the tendency of State Churches 
 is to develop those two forms of error which we describe 
 as Csesarism and Clericalism. Endowment and Estab- 
 lishment tend to foster those two tendencies which are 
 known as Erastianism and Ecclesiasticism the two 
 parties, as we may call them, of the Herodians and the 
 Pharisees. Some Churches lean more in the one direc- 
 tion, others in the other ; and the same Church, as we 
 see in the case of the English Church, has inclined at 
 one time in the Erastian direction, and at another 
 towards the Ecclesiastical type. Generally, it will be 
 found that when she was most favoured by the State and 
 lapped in political privileges, she has leaned to a servile 
 type of Erastianism. Then, again, as soon as these 
 privileges have been threatened, and there has been a 
 whisper in the air of religious equality, or, at least, of 
 concurrent endowment, she has recoiled from these hate- 
 ful concessions in the direction of sacerdotalism. It was 
 the remark of the late Sir Cornewall Lewis, one of the 
 acutest thinkers of his age, that there is danger in a 
 Colonial Government leaning on a single party in the 
 community for support, for the instant that this party
 
 Scepticism and Superstition. 133 
 
 which has enjoyed a monopoly of State patronage is 
 threatened, it passes from the extreme of loyalty to dis- 
 loyalty. The Crown connection party in a colony is 
 often the most difficult to deal with when the Governor 
 attempts in any way to. dispense with it. It is pre- 
 cisely the same with a State Church. The most Eras- 
 tian Church is ready to become the most Ecclesiastical, 
 and to set up the most extravagant claims of indepen- 
 dence from the State, after having leaned on State sup- 
 port and fawned on it for its favours. 
 
 These are some of the evils which Caesarism and 
 Clericalism bring in their train. But this by no means 
 exhausts the list. The Erastian and Ecclesiastical ten- 
 dencies may be said to be confined, in a great measure, 
 to the clergy. We have also to consider how the system 
 of political Churchmanship works in the case of the 
 laity. As a rule, laymen are indifferent to either theory, 
 as such. They have no great interest in Church theories 
 in themselves, and, excepting the lawyers, whose leanings 
 towards Erastianism are easily accounted for, it cannot 
 be said that the laity, as a rule, have much sympathy 
 with Church questions, as such. With the exception of 
 a few sentimental young men affected by Ritualism, 
 the great mass of the laity, in their recoil from sacer- 
 dotal pretensions, fall into a kind of indifferentism which 
 is only one remove from utter scepticism. The fashion- 
 able religion of our day is the modern form of Hobbism, 
 which holds that " religion, like pills, is best swallowed 
 whole, not chewed." Men of this class are quite con- 
 sistent from their point of view, since State control is the 
 best check to that which they dislike the strong sense 
 of personal religion commended to every man's con-
 
 134 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 science in the sight of God. It must be admitted that 
 this class of sceptical State Churchmen constitute, after 
 all, an insignificant minority of highly-educated men. 
 Their "sweet reasonableness" of a religion which is 
 only a form of ethical culture never has, and never will, 
 lay hold on the great mass of mankind. To the great 
 majority a religion is worthy of State support, not be- 
 cause it is a reasonable hypothesis with regard to an 
 insoluble mystery, but because it is a true and authentic 
 record of the Divine will. That this should be doubted 
 by many within the pale of the Establishment, and 
 denied by all without it, is fatal to its claim as an Estab- 
 lishment ; and no one will question that we have 
 reached this stage at present. 
 
 There is nothing so difficult to attack and deal with 
 as this scepticism which conceals itself beneath the 
 folds of an Established Church. No one who observes 
 the currents of thought in modern society can shut his 
 eyes to the fact, that two opposite tendencies are set up 
 and fostered by this dangerous inducement to conformity 
 which a State Church holds out. It fosters superstition 
 in one class and scepticism in another. There are the 
 Hobbists, who say that nothing is so certain as that we 
 cannot assert that the opposite may be true. All reli- 
 gions are only guesses in the dark approximations to 
 an insoluble problem. Thus they stake their belief in 
 a highly-dogmatic Church, on the quaking foundation of 
 scepticism, as to any certainty in revealed truth. They 
 repeat the cynical sentiment of the philosopher of 
 Malmesbury, that orthodoxy is the religion which the 
 head of the State approves of, and heterodoxy what he 
 disapproves of. It is the mischievous maxim of the
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 135 
 
 German princes which has done so much to undermine 
 all faith in religion cynically put, cujus regio ejus religio. 
 On the other hand, this wave of scepticism from the side 
 of the Hobbists is met by a counter current of supersti- 
 tion and blind reverence for Church authority as such. 
 Priests and philosophers have ever been at work to 
 destroy the simplicity which is in Christ Jesus ; but at 
 no time have they obtained such a following as at pre- 
 sent among the semi-educated and fashionable classes of 
 modern society. The rise of Ritualism has been coinci- 
 dent with the rapid increase of wealth and luxury 
 among the commercial classes. Concurrent causes have 
 been at work in both cases. Wealth calls for new out- 
 lets for indulgence and enjoyment, and art is the first to 
 dip its feet in the golden Pactolus which flows from our 
 mines and manufactories. But worship is akin to art, or 
 has long considered art as her handmaid. It is but a 
 step, then, to call in art to assist in making worship 
 more stimulating to the wealthy classes, who are jaded 
 already with excitement and sated with pleasure. This 
 is the true rationale of the rise of Ritualism ; it is the 
 expression of a craving for worship released from the 
 dulness and dryness alike of the old Church and Chapel 
 of last century. We are not insensible to the reasons 
 for the reaction, and if it had ended here, few would 
 have had much to complain of in Ritualism. But the 
 roots of sacerdotalism lay in the Anglican Church; 
 they were left there for peace' sake at the time of the 
 Reformation, in the hopes that they would die away in 
 the ground. Unfortunately it has been otherwise. 
 Sacerdotalism and the aesthetic craving for ceremonial 
 in religion have come together and formed an amalgam
 
 136 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 which, like the Corinthian brass, is found to be 
 the hardest of metals because it is the result of a fusion 
 of several. Thus it is that a sceptical tendency in one 
 class is met by a superstitious in another, and in Oxford 
 perhaps more than anywhere else these two tendencies 
 are focused and come to a head in the rivalries of the 
 schools of the High and Broad Churches. The two 
 parties meet on the common ground of a State Church, 
 and though the difference between the two is this, that 
 while the High Church, like the Ultramontanes, would 
 wish to see the spiritual ruling the secular, and the Broad 
 Church would reverse the relation, they are agreed 
 in desiring to keep up the connection. Neither party 
 is prepared to see the Church reduced to that state of 
 republican simplicity in which, with little organisation 
 and no wealth or influence to attract the worldly, she 
 would be regarded simply with indifference by politi- 
 cians, and passed by as much as the questions which 
 exercise musicians or mathematicians are by those 
 \vhose interests turn on the affairs of this world. 
 
 It is for this reason that if the Church is to be dises- 
 tablished it should be done quickly, before this supersti- 
 tion and scepticism have eaten into the vitals of society > 
 as they are threatening to do under a system which 
 favours a hollow conformity. We are too prone some- 
 times to thank God that English society is not as 
 French ; whereas, among the upper classes at least, the 
 resemblance between the two is as fully marked as are 
 the contrasts. In both there is a blind fear and hatred 
 among the upper classes of what is called democracy. 
 The reign of privilege is threatened : feudalism, or the 
 government of a conquering race the Franks over the
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 137 
 
 Romanised Celts in France, the Normans over the 
 Anglo-Saxons in this country is nearly extinct. The 
 reason for it has long since disappeared with the fusion 
 of the two races ; but, as we know, institutions cling on 
 to life long after the reason for their existence has 
 passed away. Hence it is that the traditions of feudal- 
 ism as a governing caste in Church and State are 
 strongest at a time when the institution itself for any 
 practical purpose has disappeared. The stern facts of 
 history die out in a haze of sentiment as the sun sinks 
 to his rest in a blazon of orange and purple and gold. 
 The reaction, as it is called, in France is fiercest at the 
 time when the Revolution has triumphed all along the 
 line. The more the principle of authority is questioned 
 in all matters, religious and secular, the more passion- 
 ately it asserts itself. All despotisms die hard, a spiri- 
 tual despotism hardest of alh So heroic are its 
 struggles to assert itself in the teeth of the age that it 
 sometimes awes its conquerors, as the majesty of 
 Imperial Rome awed the barbarians who viewed it, and 
 led to the epithet, the Eternal City. It was given this 
 name by the Saxon pilgrims who saw it in the eighth 
 century at the moment of its utter ruin. In the same 
 way the Church of Rome, that ghost of the Roman 
 Empire sitting crowned on its grave, has struck even 
 Liberals like Macaulay with a sense of its being per- 
 petual the Tithonus of Churches which never could 
 die. There is nothing more remarkable than this 
 reaction of Clericalism at the time when its death was 
 watched for. The spirit of sacerdotalism has revived 
 as much in England as in France, and, as a rule, 
 the privileged classes have rallied to it in the hope of
 
 138 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 finding some succour from it for their own declining 
 status. Thus it is that the battles of the past Saxons 
 against Normans, commons against lords, Protestant- 
 ism against priestcraft are being fought over again in 
 our day. The weapons are different, but the comba- 
 tants are essentially the same classes. It is fought 
 out in the Press and on the platform, not in the 
 council-chamber and on the battle-field ; but it is none 
 the less a war of classes, and though the event in the 
 long run is certain, we are not to blind ourselves to 
 the immediate results of the struggle. 
 
 This being so, it is the duty of those who admit 
 that the Church must be disestablished not to tem- 
 porise or delay. Even in a single generation that 
 Church has changed her front, and is no longer the 
 same Church of the Reformation that it formerly was. 
 This silent revolution dates from the year 1834. The 
 rise of the new theology was received at first with a 
 chorus of condemnation from the whole Bench of 
 Bishops. Episcopal charges rained down censures 
 on the " Tracts for the Times." A whole literature 
 was called out in reply to them. Authorities were ran- 
 sacked, and files of long-forgotten worthies, the fathers 
 and founders of the Reformation, were called up from 
 the dust of libraries to rebuke the intruders. The 
 Parker Society publications were reprinted in the vain 
 hope that this cloud of testimony from Elizabethan 
 divines would rebuke the audacity of the attempt. 
 Nothing daunted by this appeal to authority, the inno- 
 vators hurled back rival tomes into the enemy's camp. 
 The Anglo-Catholic Library of reprints of the Caroline 
 school of divines was projected in reply to the Parker
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 139 
 
 series. It was a veritable battle of the books, and 
 though the weight of testimony rested with the divines 
 of the Reformed school, there was no denying that 
 Anglo-Catholic theology had its locus standi, at least 
 since Laud's time, in the English Church. A few years 
 later and the controversy took a new turn. A Cornish 
 vicar refused to subscribe to the dogma of baptismal 
 regeneration, in a sacerdotal sense, which was applied to 
 him as a test of orthodoxy by the Bishop of Exeter of 
 that day. The case went from Court to Court, until the 
 Supreme Court of Appeal, guided, it is said, chiefly by 
 Lord Langdale's advice, decided in favour of an open 
 construction of the dogma, leaving the clergy the liberty 
 to hold the baptismal term " regeneration " in a sacer- 
 dotal sense or not. This memorable judgment in the 
 case of Gorham against the Bishop of Exeter has given 
 a set to the judgments of the Privy Council on appeal 
 ever since. It has created, in fact, a new theory of 
 subscription, in which any interpretation is allowed 
 which does not openly impugn the Articles, instead of 
 the opposite, which excluded every sense but one. The 
 three parties in the Church have successively been 
 shielded in this way from proscription by their rivals, 
 and it has been the desire of the lawyers to make the 
 Church broad and comprehensive as it was that of the 
 divines to make it narrow and exclusive. 
 
 The result of this politic toleration of divergent and 
 sharply-contrasted theologies has not been an unmixed 
 good. It has preserved the Church from disruption, it is 
 true, or from disestablishment which must have ensued 
 from the forcible expulsion of any one of the three parties 
 by a combination of the other two. In this sense it has
 
 140 Scepticism and Siiperstition 
 
 saved the Church from breaking up into sects, as Free 
 Churches are in danger of doing. But, on the other 
 hand, this " sticking to the ship " theory, as it has been 
 called, has its drawbacks. In the first place, it lays an 
 undue stress on conformity for its own sake. Unless 
 we set truth above unity, above even brotherly concord, 
 we are in danger of throwing away the substance for 
 the shadow, the kernel of religion for the husk of its 
 outward establishment. In the next place, it generates 
 a sceptical and indifferent state of mind with regard to 
 essentials. Once we are launched down the fatal 
 descent of compromise and the subscription of formu- 
 laries in a non-natural sense, it is impossible to say 
 where we can stop. All dogmas and definitions are 
 only approximations to the solution of an insoluble 
 mystery, and we end at last by thinking, as Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold is fond of repeating, that one approxi- 
 mation is as good as another, and that the only class 
 who are utterly wrong are those stiff and unyielding 
 Dissenters who will not first conform and then subscribe 
 the Articles in some non-natural sense of their own. 
 The result of this tendency is to foster scepticism, and 
 that of the worst kind that dry rot of the soul which 
 sets in when we are too lazy to take up the flooring 
 of the house we inhabit, and to see for ourselves on 
 what foundations our faith rests. The evil does not 
 end there. When a Church is held together with ex- 
 ternal clamps of conformity only, and dissent from its 
 doctrines takes the form not of external revolt but of 
 internal dislike to its dogmas, the malady is then driven 
 in. Those peccant humours of the body which, when 
 they break out on the surface in skin disease, pass away,
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 141 
 
 become mortal maladies when they attack the vital 
 parts. The result of thirty years' struggle in the English 
 Church between two schools of theology has been to 
 generate scepticism in one extreme and superstition in 
 the other. No intelligent friend of the Church, and 
 especially no layman, who values it chiefly as an instru- 
 ment for promoting practical piety, can regard it now 
 with any other than feelings of deep alarm, rising in 
 some cases to positive aversion. The Church is out- 
 wardly the same as ever her formularies are un- 
 changed ; but if we look below the surface and judge 
 her by the prevalent tone of her clergy, we should say 
 that she is not the same Church. The proof of this is 
 to be sought in the tone of her organs. Between the 
 organs of the extreme High and Low Church parties 
 there is a division deeper far than between any two 
 bodies of Nonconformists. To bridge over this chasm 
 is impossible. All the warnings of the moderate men 
 on both sides are thrown away. Perish the Church if 
 she ceases to be Protestant, is the watchword of one 
 party. Away with the Establishment if it hinders the 
 spread of the Catholic revival, is the answer back from 
 the organ of the other party. Terms of accommoda- 
 tion are impossible, and as the school of the Rock have 
 the dead weight of popular Protestantism on their side, 
 they are the least willing of the two to listen to any- 
 thing like a compromise. The conviction that if it went 
 by an appeal to the great mass of the laity they would 
 have to leave the Church has driven the Ritualist party 
 even to desire disestablishment as the less evil of the 
 two. They have practically become Liberationists, not 
 from conviction, but out of sheer despair of holding their
 
 142 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 ground any longer in the Church in the face of the 
 recent judgments under the new Public Worship Act. 
 Thus it is that forces within the Church as well as 
 forces without have risen up to strengthen the hands of 
 those who see no remedy but one for the present 
 confusions. 
 
 It is in cases like these that delays are dangerous. 
 The longer the evil day, as they regard it, is staved off, 
 the worse it will be for those who must go out into a 
 Free Church of the future. Had it been disestablished 
 thirty years ago, it might have organised itself, as the 
 Irish Church is now doing, as a distinctively Protestant 
 Church. But the little leaven has now leavened the 
 whole lump. The clergy are familiarised with a new 
 theology ; a College has been founded at Oxford, 
 named after, and as a memorial to, one of the repre- 
 sentative names of the Tractarian party. Keble Col- 
 lege is more than a literary memorial to the author of 
 " The Christian Year " : it is a visible symbol of the 
 triumph of the new doctrine of the Corporal Presence. 
 Between the first and the last editions of " The Chris- 
 tian Year," there is a notable change in one line. It is 
 the Homousion and Homoiousion of modern contro- 
 versy. 
 
 " Oh, come to our Communion Feast ! 
 
 There, present in the heart, 
 Not in the hands, th' Eternal Priest 
 Will His true Self impart." 
 
 So Keble wrote in 1827 ; but when he revised the last 
 edition a few years before his death, the reading stood 
 thus: 
 
 " Oh, come to our Communion Feast ! 
 
 There, present in the heart, 
 As in the hands, th' Eternal Priest 
 Will His true Self impart."
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Chitrchism. 143 
 
 The note accompanying explains, but does not justify, 
 the change. It is only too plain a proof of a change of 
 mind on the part of the saintly writer himself, who was 
 carried on by the fatal spirit of logical consistency to 
 hold the doctrine of the Corporal Presence and of 
 Eucharistical Adoration. That this new doctrine has 
 warped the minds of hundreds of the clergy, and made 
 them unsafe stewards of the mysteries of God in a 
 Church calling itself Reformed, is also undeniable. To 
 this we may add the attempts of Dr. Pusey, the late 
 Bishop Forbes, and others, to construct an Eirenikon, 
 or, at least, to force the Prayer-book and Articles into a 
 certain harmony with the Roman doctrine of the Mass. 
 Desperate as these expedients may seem to any un- 
 prejudiced layman, the mischief does not end with the 
 authors of these disingenuous attempts to bring the age 
 back under the yoke of sacerdotalism. These assump- 
 tions of the power of the clergy to work some change in 
 the elements by virtue of certain words of consecration 
 are half believed in by those who do not themselves go 
 quite so far in the Romeward direction. Parties, it is 
 said, like serpents, are moved by their tails. To use a 
 less offensive metaphor, the clergy are like mobs, pushed 
 on from behind. Bold and unscrupulous men, often 
 writing as anonymous journalists, put out extreme 
 assertions in Church organs. The statement passes un- 
 rebuked, the practice gets tacitly sanctioned, and so the 
 mass of High Churchmen are pushed helplessly on into 
 ceremonies and beliefs which, if stated at first in their 
 naked fulness, they would reject with indignation. 
 Eucharistical Adoration, the Real Presence, Confession, 
 Penance, and Purgatory are now taught almost without
 
 144 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 reserve. Even in things indifferent, a practice is pre- 
 ferred because it is Roman, and, saving for Celibacy and 
 the Infallibility of the Pope, there is nothing to hinder 
 a formal reunion between the Anglo-Catholic and the 
 Roman Catholic schools of theology. The reunion of 
 Christendom, in the narrow sacerdotal sense of the term, 
 is openly called for, and the weakness of those who 
 allowed Convocation to meet as a mere Clerical Parlia- 
 ment has been taken advantage of to set up a theory of 
 the Church which is Ultramontane in all but name. 
 
 The sacerdotal party see their advantage, and do not 
 hesitate to push it on in the teeth of the remonstrance 
 of moderate men. As for the Evangelical party, for 
 some reason, they have lost their old nerve and fibre, and 
 cling on helplessly to State connection as if their only 
 protection against the extreme men who would carry all 
 before them lay in the Establishment principle. They 
 seem to feel that, if disestablished, they would be left 
 in a hopeless minority, and so they unwisely cling on to 
 the Royal Supremacy as their only safeguard against 
 the worse evils of sacerdotalism. This is a short- 
 sighted, and, we would even say, a suicidal, policy. 
 They see the dangers of disruption, but they do not see 
 how to pluck the flower of safety out of the nettle of 
 difficulty. They are blind to the fact that the mass of 
 the laity are utterly opposed to these sacerdotal preten- 
 sions. The majority of Englishmen do not even under- 
 stand what Ritualism means, and flock to churches 
 where an advanced ritual is practised, not for the doc- 
 trines, but the music there. This inert mass of un- 
 thinking and nominal Churchmen, who are reckoned as 
 proselytes of the gate by the teachers of the new school,
 
 Tlie Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 145 
 
 would soon go over to the other side if the Church were 
 free, and synodical action, in which the balance of power 
 lay with the laity, took the place of that mediaeval 
 sham of Convocation. The Evangelical party act like 
 a flock of sheep driven by their fears into piteous ap- 
 peals to Prime Ministers to come and put down Ritual- 
 ism for them. If, instead of this, they boldly took the 
 Ritualists at their word, and appealed to the people, 
 they would rise at once to the level of their high argu- 
 ment. They have lost the direction of affairs at pre- 
 sent, but they might easily regain it. Abandoning 
 the ground of appeal to the Privy Council, if they 
 threw themselves on the people, they would probably 
 find themselves supported by public opinion. Ecclesi- 
 astical lawyers like the town-clerk of Ephesus, and poli- 
 tical bishops like Gamaliel, only dim the spiritual vision 
 of men who profess to be ministers of a Gospel which is 
 not of man or by man. It is these miserable tempo- 
 ralities which hinder spiritual men from seeing things 
 in their right light. The Evangelical party, like the 
 Laodicean Church of old, is rich and increased with 
 goods, and it needs eye-salve, in the first place, to see 
 things again in the same light as its fathers saw it. 
 
 We do not know a more miserable confession of im- 
 potence than the admission that the Low Church party 
 needs the support of the State to keep down Ritualism. 
 The argument is positively suicidal. We should wish 
 to believe, for their own sake, that it is not true ; that 
 they are taking counsel of their own fears, and that 
 fear, as the wise man defines it, is a " base betrayal 
 of the succours which reason offereth." If it be true 
 that the cause of Protestantism has no other bulwark 
 
 10
 
 146 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 than the State against a flood of Ritualistic and 
 Romanising error, then so much the worse for Pro- 
 testantism. If it has come to this, that it cannot meet 
 Rome on the ground of argument and an appeal to the 
 laity, it has signed its own death-warrant. Sometimes 
 it seems as if men otherwise able and candid will use a 
 weak argument of this kind because it appeals to the 
 base fears of their audience. Thus the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, speaking some time ago at Maidstone, told 
 the people that they might get rid of him, but there 
 was another Archbishop (referring to Cardinal Manning) 
 whom they could not get rid of in this way, and that 
 they would then have to deal with him single-handed. 
 If this meant anything more than the old " No Popery " 
 spectre, brought out to awe a rustic audience, it meant 
 that the sacerdotalism now latent in the English 
 Church would then break out in its virulent form, 
 and that we should have a home-growth type of Ultra- 
 montanism to deal with as troublesome as that which 
 makes Constitutional government so difficult to carry 
 on in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. For 
 our part, we venture to say that we do not believe a 
 word of it. That the sacerdotal spirit lurks in the 
 English Church is undeniable, and we are willing to 
 admit that Caesarism is the same check to Clericalism 
 now as the Roman power was to the leaven of 
 Judaism, to which the apostle refers as the lawless 
 one (2 Thess. ii.). But if he who letteth will let, may 
 we not believe that in the latter case, as in the former, 
 when the bulwark of political restraint is taken away, 
 a spiritual epiphany of Christ will destroy that lawless 
 one ? This " bulwark " theory is too transparent a sham
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 147 
 
 to deceive any who do not wish to be deceived. If a 
 State Church is the bulwark of Protestantism, how is it 
 that the unwearied enemies of Protestantism are those 
 who have stolen out of the citadel of the Establishment 
 and gone over to the enemy's camp ? Nor are these 
 open renegades its most dangerous foes. " Save me 
 from my friends," the State Church may say ; " I can 
 deal with my foes." It is those who remain behind 
 the bulwark to sap and mine it who are most to be 
 dreaded. All that the Protestant party can do is to 
 countermine and to carry on underground battles, as 
 we may describe them, in Courts of Arches. These 
 ecclesiastical suits, sub arcubus, may be honest attempts 
 to meet sap with sap and mine with mine ; but we would 
 rather fight in the open, and, if we must die, like Ajax, 
 let us die in the light. No ! the truth is that it is the 
 State Church which makes the evil which it afterwards 
 tries to mend. A Free Church must, in the long run, 
 be a small and a weak Church. As such it will not hold 
 out attractions to men who enter the ministry under 
 secondary motives. It offers too small a scope for 
 ecclesiastical ambition. The disputes of a sect are 
 like storms in a pond in comparison to those in the 
 open sea. The tendency of sects is to subdivide, to 
 weaken themselves by continued secessions; and all 
 this, though it may be an evil from a certain point 
 of view, is not the danger from which we have to 
 protect ourselves by State control and patronage. 
 
 On the whole, then, we conclude that the only remedy 
 for the present state of confusion is to let the Church 
 alone to disintegrate itself. At present, by keeping 
 the Church under the control of the Legislature, we 
 
 10 2
 
 148 Scepticism and Superstition 
 
 secure to it a certain external uniformity which is very 
 dear to the upper and governing classes. But we 
 obtain this at the price of its internal life and spiritual 
 usefulness. Admitting, as we do, that Christianity is 
 the salt of the earth, and desiring to see that salt 
 seasoning the mass of secular life, we cannot consent 
 to an arrangement by which the salt loses its savour. 
 The Church is the spiritual counteractive to the State ; 
 it supplies those principles which secular life needs. 
 But we do not go on to argue that it is, therefore, the 
 statesman's duty to incorporate the spiritual society 
 with the secular, and construct a State which shall be 
 one and the same society in its secular and spiritual 
 relations. All history is one long protest against this 
 grand mistake of legislators. The result of this union 
 is either an ecclesiastical State like Judaism, or a 
 political Church like the State religions of Greece and 
 Rome. In the former case, the hierarchy rule the State ; 
 in the latter, the magistracy control the Church. But, 
 in either case, the true interests of religion are marred 
 and hindered. History, which records these mistakes, 
 does not record a single instance of the true relation, 
 which is that of a benevolent neutrality. This admis- 
 sion seems to tell against our case, for if what has been 
 will be, presumably we may infer that what never has 
 been never can be. But we are not so sure of that. The 
 history of human progress is the gradual elimination of 
 error. The story of human progress, as Beccaria re- 
 marks, presents to us the picture of a vast " sea of error, 
 in which only a few tempest-tossed barks at a distance 
 from each other emerge to the surface of truth." This 
 being so in other things, we are encouraged to hope
 
 The Outgrowth of State-Churchism. 149 
 
 that the errors of Church history will not be repeated 
 for ever. The theory of perfect indifference on the part 
 of the State has only been slowly reached in America, 
 and even there the theory has still some who distrust 
 it. It was not struck out at a heat there ; it was no 
 inspiration of the Pilgrim Fathers, nor even a happy 
 thought of the founders of the Republic, who drew up 
 the Declaration of Independence. Slowly and reluc- 
 tantly the control of religion has been renounced by 
 politicians there, and it is only in the same timid, tenta- 
 tive way that we can expect the like results in the Old 
 World. We must be patient with men's prejudices, as 
 God is, and trust that the mistakes of the past will 
 compel men at last to see that the only help they 
 can render to religion is summed up in the words 
 of Gamaliel, " Refrain from these men, and let them 
 alone;" or in the answer of the merchants to Colbert, 
 " Laissez nous faire"
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 GROWTH OF THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS 
 NEUTRALITY 
 
 "SEEING that the Royal Academy now usurps the 
 place without discharging the functions of a national 
 institution, it becomes important to consider what, if any, 
 are the available means of reform. That the Society 
 should be preserved in its present state, like one of 
 Sir Charles Dilke's unreformed corporations, for the 
 sake of the picturesque beauty of its decay, is a sug- 
 gestion which would be scarcely found flattering, even 
 in the eyes of the Academicians themselves. Many 
 of these gentlemen, as we have seen, are fully alive 
 to the magnitude of the interests entrusted to their 
 keeping, and are very conscious of the proved in- 
 competence of the body to which they belong. For 
 it is not to be supposed that the failures of the 
 Academy are merely historical, or that its appro- 
 priate labours are now complete. Much remains to 
 be done, although the Academy does little, and the 
 artistic requirements of the time are certainly not to 
 be measured by the capabilities or achievements of a 
 society that is pledged to inaction." 
 
 The above remarks on the Royal Academy (quoted
 
 Growth of the Idea of Religiotis Neutrality. 151 
 
 from a letter to the Pall Matt Gazette, by Mr. J. 
 Comyns Carr),* might be applied mutato nomine to 
 an Established Church. Academies for Art and Estab- 
 lishments of religion labour under the same drawback. 
 They alike degenerate under that law of traditionalism 
 which represses all individuality, and which is the in- 
 herent vice of all corporate bodies. The law of decay, 
 written on all such institutions, may be summed up in 
 this law of the conservation of form at the expense 
 of life, which is the opposite of the Darwinian law that 
 the strong displace the weak. In the case of corporate 
 bodies, as of Trade Unions, it is the weak and the 
 imitative who displace the strong and self-reliant. It 
 may protect the weak in the struggle for existence, but 
 it is at the expense of progress. Every great and 
 beneficial principle, whether in art, science, or religion, 
 has had to pass through the cold fit of national neglect, 
 and the hot fit of State support and patronage. It is 
 difficult to say whether the cold or the hot fit is the 
 most injurious to its best interests. Art has had its 
 Academies, science its Colleges of Surgeons and Physi- 
 cians, its Royal Institutions and Royal Societies, and 
 religion its State Churches. The result is the same in 
 all three cases. Happily for art and science the fatal 
 embrace of the State has not been thrown round 
 them in the same way. They have never wanted royal 
 patrons and ministers, like Maecenas and Richelieu, to 
 throw around them the false glare of public recogni- 
 tion. But, on the whole, they have been left alone to 
 an extent which it has not been the good fortune of 
 religion to participate in. How little Academies have 
 
 * Vide Pall Mall Gazette, March 9, 1876.
 
 152 Growth of the Idea 
 
 done for real art, or Royal Societies for true science, let 
 history be witness. Art, which is imitative, and science, 
 which is only the learning what other men have thought, 
 are not strangled by patronage. For this reason there is 
 a use in colleges and endowments for book learning. 
 All that learning asks for is leisure, and endowments 
 provide that for it. But all true art, which is inventive, 
 and the higher science, which implies research, will never 
 get their meed from Royal Academies and Societies. 
 The endowment of research is one of the dreams of 
 our day ; but the dream will never be realised, for 
 there is no testing the true scientist. Learning of all 
 kinds may be tested, and so may be safely endowed ; 
 but real invention is like poetry, an inspiration which 
 is its own reward. Much more is this the case with 
 regard to religion. Unhappily for the true interests 
 of religion, politicians have been possessed with the 
 thought that, since it is the most important factor 
 of human welfare, it must not be left out of account 
 in the building-up of political societies. The remark 
 is as old as Plutarch, that you may find cities without 
 walls, or monuments, or palaces of any kind ; but a 
 city without a temple to the immortal gods is not 
 to be met with. The inference seems obvious, that 
 what is so important to human welfare must come 
 under the special protection of the magistrate. To 
 him, at least, all religions, whether equally true, as the 
 multitude think, or false, as the philosopher holds 
 them to be, are equally useful. When modern apo- 
 logists for State Churches appeal to antiquity, it is as 
 well to meet them with the frank admission, that if 
 authority is worth anything, it is entirely on their side.
 
 Of Religions Neutrality. 153 
 
 The precedents, such as they are, only establish one 
 order of things. We meet with only one of two types 
 of society, the Asiatic or European the one, the 
 religio-political, or Church-State ; the other, the politico- 
 religious, or State-Church. In the one, which is hieratic, 
 as in Egypt, Assyria, and among the Jews, the State 
 is a function of the Church ; in the other, which is 
 democratic, as in Greece and Rome, the Church is 
 a function of the State. The only difference is, that 
 what is first in the Oriental conception of things is 
 second in the West, and vice versa. But with this 
 difference : they are at one as to their view of reli- 
 gion as an organised institution with a priesthood 
 and ritual, which is to enter into and take part in 
 the political life of the State. But whether a Church- 
 State, as in the East, or a State-Church, as in the 
 West, it comes to nearly the same thing ; and the 
 controversies of modern times, whether on politics or 
 religion, all turn on the question, " What think ye of 
 Christ ? " Did He come as a religious reformer, to- 
 destroy false cults and set up a pure cult in its place ? 
 So thought Constantine, so Charlemagne, Alfred, and 
 all politicians and public men, almost without excep- 
 tion to our day, the exceptions being so few and far 
 between that they are of absolutely no account, un- 
 less we weigh authorities as well as count them. 
 Churchmen have not been slow in echoing this 
 commonplace of politicians. Not to speak of syco- 
 phants, like the Byzantine clergy of the Lower 
 Empire, or the Bancrofts of our Church, to whom 
 James' utterances against the Puritans seemed the 
 language of inspiration, it is a melancholy fact that
 
 154 Growth of the Idea 
 
 no sect (if we except, perhaps, the Friends and the 
 Baptists) have escaped this taint of Caesarism. They 
 have all worshipped the image which Nebuchadnezzar 
 has set up. 
 
 It is a remark of M. de Laveleye, in a pamphlet on 
 Protestantism and Catholicism, that "the action of 
 religion is so profound on the minds of men that they 
 are always led to give to the State forms which they 
 have borrowed from that of religion." This is true ; but 
 so is the converse. It is equally true that men are led 
 to give to the Church forms borrowed from those of 
 politics. It was so in the second and third centuries. 
 The absolute and autocratic principle had asserted itself 
 in politics, and it passed into religion. Men in their 
 helplessness crouched, from fear of anarchy, beneath the 
 shadow of a Divus Ccesar, and the Church, uncon- 
 sciously at first, but afterwards more openly, copied this 
 bad example. She abandoned the Commonwealth or 
 Republican, and organised herself on a Monarchical 
 type. This explains the rise of diocesan episcopacy. 
 She was taken up into the political system of the 
 empire, and consequently had to accommodate herself 
 to her new position. At first the purple sat uneasily on 
 her, and her monks and hermits of the desert, who were 
 the Dissenters and Nonconformists of that day, raised 
 their protest, such as it was, against the worldliness of 
 prelatical Churches. It was all in vain. The gold and 
 the iron, the brass and the clay, had become mixed, 
 and the result was that long conflict between a Kirchen- 
 Staat and a Staat-Kirche, the Byzantine and the Roman 
 idea of supremacy. In the West this conflict was 
 aggravated from the fact that Caesar's throne was
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 155 
 
 vacant, and an unheard-of claim was set up, based on 
 forged Decretals and a lying legacy, that Constantine 
 had abdicated in favour of Pope Sylvester. That 
 standing difficulty of modern States, Ultramontanism, 
 grows out of this state of things. In a recent paper in 
 the Fortnightly M. de Laveleye states this with his 
 usual precision and point : 
 
 " The Catholic clergy claim that to the Pope alone 
 belongs the right of deciding, in the last instance, 
 whether a civil law is binding. They could not, there- 
 fore, admit that the lay Government should impose 
 conditions on the nomination of priests. That would 
 have been to recognise the supremacy of the State, and 
 they maintain, on the contrary, the principle of the 
 supremacy of the Church. The importance of the 
 dispute is plain. Nothing less than a question of 
 sovereignty is at stake. Who is to be master in Ger- 
 many, the civil power the Emperor and the Chambers 
 or the Pope? It is the old quarrel of investiture, 
 the old struggle between the Papacy and the Empire. 
 The only way of bringing it to an end would be to 
 adopt the American system of complete separation. 
 But the Germans contend, and perhaps not without 
 reason, that such a system is only good for Protestant 
 countries. In a Catholic country they say it conducts 
 directly to the enslavement of the State and the -abso- 
 lute domination of the Pope, as is to be seen in 
 Belgium. The State professes to ignore the Church, 
 and not to concern itself with it. But the Church only 
 admits the system provisionally, and with a view of 
 drawing from it the means of establishing its own 
 power. It claims that the State should be subjected to
 
 156 Groivth of the Idea 
 
 its laws ; it makes itself master of the instruction of the 
 young, on whom it inculcates its own ideas, and it 
 carries these ideas into triumphant practice the day 
 after it has gained the majority in the country. The 
 struggle is thus made inevitable, and the only alterna- 
 tive is to bow beneath the Sovereign Pontiff, who holds 
 in his hands the two swords the sword of civil and the 
 sword of ecclesiastical authority. What seems to mark 
 that the conflict cannot be avoided is that it has broken 
 out in all the Catholic countries in France, in Spain, in 
 Belgium, in Italy, in Ireland. On the other side of the 
 seas at this very moment it is pursued with no less 
 violence in Brazil and throughout Catholic America. 
 The battle that is being waged in Prussia is, therefore, a 
 fact that results from the nature of things a sort of 
 historic necessity for Catholic countries." 
 
 Hence it is that this mistake of politicians as to the 
 meaning of Christ's kingdom has been a " funeral dower 
 of present woes and past " to the Church and the world. 
 If they had left the Church to itself, and regarded it as 
 an insignificant sect of Ebionites or Essenes the 
 Ebionites or poor ones, the Essenes or pure ones, Puri- 
 tans (for so the two words mean in the Hebrew) the 
 leaven of Prelacy and the full-blown apostacy of the 
 Papacy might have been kept out of the Church. But 
 it was not to be. Perhaps it was part of God's purposes 
 that the Church of the future was to learn by the mis- 
 takes of the past, as the camel finds its track by the 
 whitened bones of the caravans which bleach the desert. 
 The descent of the Church into the mediaeval apostacy 
 was long and painful. Long and painful is her track 
 upward to the spiritual highlands of liberty and inde-
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 157 
 
 pendence. A dominant Church becomes a persecuting 
 .Church. The age of the martyrs is reproduced within 
 herself, and the mystic Babylon is drunk with the blood 
 of dissenters from the dominant creed. This is the 
 nadir of her descent, and as it is the darkest point so it 
 precedes the dawn. Then there arose new sects of 
 Ebionites and Essenes, Christ's poor ones and preachers 
 the Peter Waldos, Wiclifs, Husses, and Jeromes of 
 Prague. They are persecuted as before, they are counted 
 as sheep to the slaughter ; but still they gather followers. 
 These hunted men band together as David and his out- 
 laws in their caves of Adullam, and at last David comes 
 to his throne, the persecution ends, Protestantism is a 
 religion to be treated with, and even Spanish Philip 
 has to put out his fires in the Netherlands. After a 
 brief reaction and an ill-starred effort of Protestan- 
 tism to repeat the vain attempt to enforce uniformity, 
 men begin to see the mistake. A new idea dawns on 
 their minds. Liberty, if not equality, is the last word 
 of Protestantism in the seventeenth century. The 
 nobler idea of perfect religious equality has not yet 
 broken on the world. Still the gain has been great, and 
 a point has been made good from which the Church 
 and the world will never again recede. 
 
 It has been remarked by Professor Masson, in his life 
 of Milton, that the history of the modern idea of tolera- 
 tion could be written completely only after a large 
 amount of special research. Who shall say on the heads 
 of what stray and solitary men scattered throughout 
 Europe in the sixteenth century, rari nantes in gurgite 
 vasto, some form of the idea as a purely speculative con- 
 ception may have been lodged ? Hallam finds it in the
 
 158 Growth of the Idea 
 
 " Utopia" of Sir T. More (14801535), and in the dis- 
 courses of the Chancellor 1'Hopital of France (1505 . 
 1573), and there have been others. But the history of 
 the idea as a practical and political notion lies within a 
 more precise range. Out of what conflicts and contro- 
 versies carried on in Europe during the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries was the practical form of the idea 
 bred ? Out of pain, out of suffering, out of persecution 
 not pain inflicted constantly on one and the same set 
 of men, or on any two opposed sections alternately ; but 
 pain revolving, pain circulated, pain distributed till the 
 whole round of the compass of sects had felt it in turn, 
 and the only principle of its prevention gradually 
 dawned on the common consciousness. 
 
 Thus it is that persecution and toleration are corre- 
 lated or rather, to speak more accurately, toleration is 
 a kind of after-thought upon persecution. It is with 
 toleration as with free trade ; in both cases the general- 
 isation was only reached after a long induction of 
 instances, and after the opposite theory had been tried 
 under every case and had signally failed. The simplest 
 hypothesis is not the first, on the contrary, it is the 
 last, to be resorted to in any scientific inquiry. It is the 
 same with moral questions. Men tried an enforced 
 uniformity in worship, clung to it long, in spite of the 
 cruelties it inflicted on others, and only renounced it at 
 last when it could no longer be concealed that the evils 
 of State compulsion in religious matters outweighed the 
 advantages. 
 
 But toleration is, after all, only a step, though an 
 important one, in the stage to the entire separation of 
 Church and State. It was the Dutch sect of Baptists
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 159 
 
 who seem to have been the first to reach this stage. In 
 a Confession, or Declaration of Faith, put forth in 
 1611 by the English Baptists in Amsterdam, this article 
 occurs : " The magistrate is not to meddle with religion 
 or matters of conscience, nor compel men in this or that 
 form of religion, because Christ is the King and Law- 
 giver of the Church and of conscience." It is believed 
 that this is the first expression of the absolute liberty of 
 conscience in the public articles of any body of Chris- 
 tians. This principle of the Anglo-Dutch Baptists was 
 imported into England. It was three years after this 
 memorable declaration had been made in Amsterdam 
 that a tract appeared in London with the title, " Re- 
 ligious Peace ; or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience." 
 This was printed in 1614, and presented to King James 
 and the English Parliament by Leonard Busher, citizen 
 of London. Other tracts also appeared from the same 
 source. The Baptists clearly had the honour of leading 
 the way in the enunciation of this great truth, in which 
 they were followed at some interval by the Indepen- 
 dents, and then, more reluctantly still, by the Presbyte- 
 rians and Episcopalians. The last two sects cannotbe 
 said to have admitted the general principle at all. 
 They held it with so many reservations as to essentials 
 and non-essentials the heresies which were deadly and 
 those which were not as to render their theory on the 
 subject, if they had any, practically nugatory. It was 
 the Americanised Welshman, Roger Williams, in his 
 tract, "The Bloudy Tenent (i.e., Bloody Tenet) of 
 Persecution for Cause of Conscience, discussed in a 
 Conference between Truth and Peace, written in 
 London in 1644," who asserted the principle in its
 
 160 Growth of the Idea 
 
 fullest extent. In this he was followed by John 
 Goodwin, the vicar of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, 
 whom the Presbyterians had denounced as an Arminian, 
 Socinian, and what not. Williams carries the theory to 
 its natural conclusion. He shows that a National 
 Church was not instituted by Christ Jesus. The civil 
 commonweal and the spiritual commonweal, the 
 Church, are not inconsistent, though independent the 
 one of the other. " Persons," he adds in his striking 
 way, " may with less sin be forced to marry when they 
 cannot love than to worship what they cannot believe." 
 The civil power owes, he says, tJiree things to the true 
 Church of Christ I, Approbation ; 2, Submission ; 3, 
 Protection ; while it owes two things to false worship- 
 pers i, Permission ; 2, Protection. Goodwin, in the 
 same way, went beyond the ordinary Independent 
 theory of tolerating within limits. He seems to have 
 seen that to tolerate orthodox sects, but not heterodox, 
 was to give with one hand and to take away with the 
 other. It was to set up a State censorship of religions, 
 and virtually thus to merge the Church in the State. 
 How far this went beyond the ideas of the age is seen 
 from the violent abuse heaped on both these eminent 
 men by the Presbyterian party. In a sermon preached 
 before Parliament in 1644, Edwards attacked two classes 
 of underminers of temple work. First, he said there were 
 those who would allow nothing to be jure divino in the 
 Church, but held that all matters of Church constitution 
 were to be settled by mere prudence and State conveni- 
 ence; in other words, the Erastians. They are lectured, 
 but let off more easily than the second sort of under- 
 miners, " such as would have a toleration of all ways of
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 161 
 
 religion in this Church." Parliament is reminded that 
 all tendency to this way of thinking is unfaithfulness to 
 the Covenant, and is told that to set the door so wide 
 open as to tolerate all religions would be to make 
 London an Amsterdam, and would lead to in fact, 
 would certainly lead to Amsterdamnation. Tolera- 
 tionism, in fact, in the jargon of the day, was regarded 
 as a new form of heresy in addition to the many which 
 abounded. The Presbyterians, who had now changed 
 places with the Prelatists, and had stepped into their 
 prejudices, regarded toleration as something worse than 
 a heresy ; it was the mother of heresies ; it was the 
 seed-plot and nursery of them all. Arminianism, 
 Erastianism, Socinianism, Seekerism, Popery itself, all 
 grew out of toleration. It is a grievous fact, but one 
 which no candid Presbyterian can shut his eyes to, that 
 from the year 1644, in which Prelacy went down and 
 Presbyterianism took its place, the arrogant, persecuting 
 spirit of the old Laudian party passed into the Puritans, 
 who now became dominant in Church and State. The 
 proofs, as Mr. Masson remarks,* are so abundant collec- 
 tively, they form such an ocean, that it passes compre- 
 hension how the contrary could have been asserted. 
 From the first appearance of the Presbyterians in force 
 after the opening of the Long Parliament, it was their 
 anxiety to beat down the rising idea of toleration ; and 
 after the meeting of the Westminster Assembly and the 
 publication of the Apologetical Narration of the Inde- 
 pendents, the one aim of the Presbyterians was to tie 
 Toleration round the neck of Independency, stuff the 
 two struggling monsters into one sack, and sink them 
 
 * Vide Milton's Life, vol. III., 129. 
 
 II
 
 162 Growth of the Idea 
 
 to the bottom of the sea. In all the Presbyterian 
 literature of the times, Baillie's Letters, Rutherford's 
 and Gillespie's Tracts, the pamphlets of English Pres- 
 byterian divines in the Assembly, this antipathy to 
 Toleration, limited or unlimited, this desire to pinion 
 Independency and Toleration together in one common 
 death, appears overwhelmingly. 
 
 But before we charge the Puritan party with in- 
 consistency in claiming toleration for themselves, and 
 then denying it to others, we should remember that 
 their error was only that of the age. With the ex- 
 ception of the Baptists and Quakers, no Church had 
 any clear ideas of the limits of civil authority. We 
 need no further proof of this than the notorious 
 instance of Gallic. The one example in the New 
 Testament of an upright magistrate, who kept him- 
 self to questions within his cognisance, was twisted 
 into an example of indifference to the interests of 
 truth. Such a startling mistake could not have been 
 possible, unless men had stumbled on the threshold 
 of the passage, unless they had looked at the nar- 
 rative of the Acts through the mists of mediaeval 
 ideas as to the duty of upholding truth with the sword. 
 All that can be said in excuse for the Presbyterians 
 is that they were no wiser than others ; they saw 
 truth through the same coloured glasses of inveterate 
 prejudice. They claimed to be tolerated themselves 
 because they were " of the truth ;" but to do unto others 
 as they would be done by was to imply that there was 
 no such thing as truth, and no infallible guide to it 
 in the Bible. The Latitudinarians, to do them justice, 
 saw the duty of toleration on the ground that truth
 
 Of Religions Netitrality. 163 
 
 is not so patent to all as the believers in verbal 
 inspiration supposed. They were tolerant of error 
 because they were sceptical, or partially so, as to any 
 certainty of religious truth. Hence it is that many 
 argue as Buckle and Lecky do, that scepticism, which, 
 like some strong acid, is the universal solvent of all 
 dogmas, is the most favourable condition for the growth 
 of toleration. It might be shown, in reply, that the 
 most sceptical age may also become the most super- 
 stitious, and in the end, and for the same reason, the 
 most intolerant. But we need not dispute the position 
 that generally toleration and philosophical breadth go 
 together. The man who has learned the lesson of 
 his own ignorance, and feels how indistinct his own 
 grasp of truth is, must be indulgent to the errors and 
 even the extravagances of others. There is the tolera- 
 tion and contempt which is all that philosophers can 
 feel, and there is the toleration of conviction, which is 
 the position the Christian has reached who understands 
 Christ's words, that His kingdom is not of this world. 
 
 But the Presbyterians of 1644 had reached neither of 
 these two stages. They had neither the breadth of 
 Milton and Hales and Chillingworth, nor the intensity 
 of spiritual perception of Roger Williams and George 
 Fox. They were evangelical, it is true, but evangelical 
 legalists of a type not uncommon in our day. Strict 
 Sabbatarians, scribes in their view of the letter of 
 inspiration, precisionists in their estimate of the import- 
 ance of dogma, and hard disciplinarians in their 
 notions of the family life, it was impossible for men 
 of this type of mind to think othenvise than they did 
 on the question of Church and State. Instinctively men 
 
 II 2
 
 164 Growth of the Idea 
 
 of Milton's culture and breadth of view turned from 
 them, and described old presbyter as priest writ large. 
 They, on the other hand, retaliated on him as a 
 Divorcer for they actually invented the name of 
 a new sect, in order to dub Milton as its proge- 
 nitor. With the waters of strife thus let loose, it was 
 difficult to see how there could be any toleration at 
 all, since all sects alike were equally willing to die 
 for their own convictions, or to put others to death 
 for theirs. Like fishes in the same pond preying on 
 each other, they were equally ready to slay or be slain ; 
 and there are men in this lukewarm age of the world 
 who look back on this state of things with a half 
 sentimental regret. It is called " earnestness," and 
 the men of that school are supposed to be heroes or 
 companions to those of this degenerate day. We do 
 not care to dispute this position. All we are anxious 
 to show is, that the ascendancy of the Puritans, 
 in 1644, led to their rapid decline and extinction 
 as a party. It was with them as with the Church 
 Evangelical party of our day. Their success was their 
 ruin. They conquered the world, and then the world 
 conquered them. Being persecuted, we bless, being 
 defamed, we entreat ; but when the role is reversed, 
 when the persecuted become the persecutors, the days 
 of the growth of the Church by the increase of God 
 are over. Church history must be written for nothing 
 if it does not teach us this, that toleration is only 
 an interim truth, a stage to something more than 
 itself. Nothing is more shallow than the cuckoo-note 
 of superficial religionists in our day. They would 
 tolerate, they tell us, all religions, but only patronise
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 165 
 
 one. They would deal in this way with idolatry in 
 India, and with Romanism in Ireland. But those who 
 repeat phrases of this kind are unconscious that they 
 are only wearing the old cast-off clothes of a bye- 
 gone age. We thank them for nothing, when they 
 tell us that they would not persecute false religions. 
 We should be sorry to trust them with the power, 
 for between patronising one religion and persecuting 
 another there are only thin partitions. Indeed, we 
 cannot call on the State to show favour to one set of 
 religious opinions without requiring it, more or less, to 
 put all others under a ban. 
 
 Toleration, then, is only the transition point between 
 the old theocratic idea of one Divine and immutable 
 truth binding on all and everywhere, and the modern 
 idea that truth is a light within the candle of the Lord, 
 for which each man is alone responsible to the God of 
 truth. The thorough sceptic and the thorough believer 
 may each be tolerant after his kind ; but the half- 
 believer the Christian hedged in with dogmas, and 
 fencing in his faith with a prickly hedge of half beliefs 
 must, to be consistent, persecute. As a phase of re- 
 ligious opinion, the history of toleration is instructive. 
 It teaches us, as we have seen, that we must go forward 
 or backward : there is no standing still at the half-way 
 house of toleration. The Presbyterians went back in 
 1644, the other sects went forward ; and the consequence 
 is that the Nonconformity of the next age ceased to be 
 Presbyterian. The Nonconformists, after 1688, slowly 
 worked on very slowly, we admit to the position 
 which they now take up of the absolute incompati- 
 bility of any alliance at all between Church and State.
 
 1 66 Growth of the Idea 
 
 This was the only logical outcome from the theory of 
 toleration, which was all that the seventeenth century 
 dared to whisper. But for us to go back to that would 
 be for a man to go back to his intellectual childhood. 
 Toleration is now only uttered in those circles where an 
 excuse is sought for religious inequality, and where it is 
 hoped in this way to disarm hostility by making the 
 privileged sect seem as little obnoxious as possible to 
 those who are outside its pale. 
 
 We have reached that stage, then, on the road of 
 political progress in which religion, like art and science, 
 is left, as a rule, to fare by itself, and all that the State 
 does is to offer it a little left-handed patronage. In 
 the case of art, it takes the shape of an Academy, 
 which is more obstructive than helpful to rising 
 genius ; and in the case of science, of a Royal Society, 
 which recognises merit when all the world has already 
 put its stamp on the great discoverer. As a rule, 
 these Academies and Societies are only coteries, or 
 mutual admiration clubs, where the "ancients" of 
 art and science sit and care for the true concerns of the 
 cause which they are organised to promote, as Olym- 
 pians do for the affairs of mortals. All corporations and 
 guilds tend to a decay of this kind. We see it in our 
 City Companies. The institution survives the object 
 for which it was instituted. The history of survivals 
 has become a branch of inquiry among those who study 
 antiquity in something more than the spirit of a mere 
 antiquarian. This tendency is seen everywhere and at 
 all times. An institution ceases to answer the end for 
 which it arose ; it is not, therefore, reformed or removed. 
 On the contrary, with its proved inutility and its
 
 Of Religious Neutrality. 167 
 
 acknowledged obsoleteness, a certain religio loci gathers 
 around it. It is not always in politics as in physiology, 
 where an organ disappears or becomes merely rudi- 
 mentary when it has ceased to discharge its proper 
 functions. On the contrary, it survives as a tradition of 
 a bygone age. Sir Henry Maine notices in this way 
 the survival of monarchical institutions on into the 
 aristocratic period of the Greek and Roman Republics. 
 Even, he adds, where the name of the monarchical 
 functions does not absolutely disappear, the authority 
 of the king is " reduced to the merest shadow. He be- 
 comes a mere hereditary general, as in Lacedaemon, a 
 mere functionary, as the King-Archon at Athens, or a 
 mere formal hierophant, like the Rex Sacrificulus at 
 Rome."* This superstitious reverence for dead forms 
 is as strong in the modern as in the ancient world. 
 Among no people is it so strong as among our own. 
 Provided the fiction be kept up, the reality may be 
 dispensed with. We saw an instance of this recently 
 in the willingness of the House of Lords to sur- 
 render their appellate jurisdiction, on condition that the 
 new Court of Appeal should consist of life peers and 
 hold their session in the accustomed place. Thus, they 
 were willing to give up the substance for the shadow, 
 and, provided that appearances were kept up, to yield 
 all that was essential in maintaining the right at all. 
 When men are so ready to cheat themselves with ap- 
 pearances, we need not wonder that reformers play 
 into their hands, and leave them the empty shell when 
 the kernel of power for which it had any value has been 
 taken away. Much of our modern Conservatism is thus 
 
 * Vide " Maine's Ancient Law," p. 10, 4th Edition.
 
 1 68 Growth of the Idea 
 
 only a reverence for extinct forms of power, and a 
 desire to keep up institutions which, by their name if no- 
 thing else, link us with the past. The more, too, the age 
 moves on in new directions, the stronger will this instinct 
 become. It is precisely because ours is a democratic 
 age, and our nation is emphatically a shop-keeping 
 nation, that we feel this instinct so strongly ; and it is the 
 commercial class who, more than any other, yield to 
 this fascination. Much of what is called the revival of 
 Church life is nothing else than the outcome of this ten- 
 dency. The Church is a little relic of feudalism which 
 has come down to our modern times. The flavour of 
 antiquarianism about it is its special charm. Its very 
 vocabulary must be recast in harmony with this ten- 
 dency. For morning and evening prayer we must speak 
 of matins and evensong ; our communions must be 
 celebrations ; and introits, antiphons, and Gregorian 
 chants replace the psalms and hymns of our younger 
 days. For the learned parson of Crabbe's time, 
 
 " Who cared not much for surplice, hood, or band, 
 But kindly took them as they came to hand," 
 
 we have the niceties of amice, alb, and tunicle not to 
 speak of the profounder mysteries of birettas, dal- 
 matics, and chasubles. These things were laughed at 
 as " man millinery " thirty years ago ; but the laugh is 
 now turned the other way. To be ignorant of these 
 things is to be behind the age a stupid slave of pigtail 
 prejudice and of the " irreverend " Georgian era. 
 Much of this is mere sentimentalism ; it is the mistake 
 of taking a survival for a revival. But it is also ex- 
 plained by a craving, not always unhealthy, for a visible 
 link between the Christianity of the past and that of
 
 Of Religions Neutrality. . 169 
 
 the present age. The Anglican Church offers itself as 
 that link. It is a corporation with unbroken succession 
 of office-bearers from remote centuries. Provided ap- 
 pearances are kept up, the majority are not troubled 
 whether the continuity is external only or internal as 
 well. The Church is the representative society of reli- 
 gion in the same way as the Royal Academy is of art, 
 or the Royal Society of pure and applied science. 
 
 No one who has to deal with the question of Dis- 
 establishment can afford to overlook such a state of 
 feeling as we have glanced at above. What is most 
 remarkable is, that the Church spirit, as it is called, is 
 more active even in towns than in the country among 
 the younger generation of the manufacturing classes 
 than among the landowners. It would be natural 
 among the latter ; among the former it is cultivated as 
 a fashion or distinguishing mark from the operative class 
 among whom they live. The Conservative and Church 
 reaction is a form of the present struggle between 
 capital and labour. Capitalists as a class are instinc- 
 tively Conservative, and resist the encroaching de- 
 mocracy of trade unions and co-operative industry, so 
 they lean to the Church as one of their natural supports 
 against this advancing tide of democracy. Like all 
 reactions in this country, it is not fanatical, and has little 
 of that passionate excitement with which the upper 
 classes in France, for instance, threw themselves into 
 the crusade against modern ideas. The " sons of the 
 Church " (to borrow Mr. Disraeli's phrase) are not like 
 the " sons of the crusaders " in France an excitable 
 set of reactionaries, who, if they had the power as they 
 have the will, would plunge Europe into a civil war for
 
 I/O Growth of the Idea 
 
 the cause of Legitimacy in France and of the Temporal 
 Power in Italy. Conservatism in this country is tinged 
 with our Saxon common-sense. It clings to the idea of 
 a dominant State Church because it is the Church of the 
 governing classes. It has no wish to disturb the seven- 
 teenth-century settlement of toleration to all. What it 
 scruples at is the consequent truth of religious equality. 
 In this the analogy of art to the Royal Academy holds 
 good. Provided only that the Academicians are left 
 on their Olympian heights undisturbed, the rank and file 
 of artists may work on as they please, and cater for the 
 public on their own terms. In the same way, the modern 
 Churchman bears no ill-will to the Dissenter, as such ; 
 on the contrary, he wishes to deal with him on the uti 
 possidetis principle. If the Church tolerates Dissent, 
 why should not Dissent in return tolerate the Church ? 
 It is true that the one is a privileged society and the 
 other not ; but whose fault is that ? The Nonconformist 
 has the remedy in his own hands. He has only to drop 
 his prejudices, and come into the Church on her own 
 terms of communion. The bigotry is all on his side : 
 the "sweet reasonableness" all on the side of Con- 
 formity. 
 
 The answer to all this is obvious. The age cannot 
 stand still or live on past formulas. Toleration to all 
 was a landing-stage in the advance of society from an 
 age of persecution to one of civil and religious equality ; 
 but it was only a landing-stage. We have left that 
 point behind in our progress, and must now make good 
 our standing on the ground of the indifference of the 
 State to all religions alike. If the Church cannot go 
 with the age in this respect, as it is obvious she cannot,
 
 Of Religions Neutrality. 171 
 
 she must be left behind. A few of her brighter intellects 
 would attempt to save her by throwing down barriers, 
 and creating new terms of comprehension. This she 
 indignantly refuses to consent to. The Bishop of 
 Lincoln, not Dean Stanley, is her representative mind ; 
 and this is why pretentions like those of the Bishop 
 are supported by the rank and file of the rural clergy, 
 while it is only an educated minority of University 
 men who follow the lead of the Dean of Westminster. 
 Even organs like the Saturday Review rather take 
 sides with the Bishop against the Dean on questions 
 like the Burials Bill, and reject a compromise which 
 would recognise the official ministry of non-Episcopal 
 Churches. 
 
 We are brought, then, to the conclusion that the 
 Church, in spite of her pretentions to Catholicity 
 nay, in consequence of it is fast subsiding into the 
 position of a sect. It has this disadvantage, that while 
 dogmatically it acts as a sect, in its administration, 
 it still claims to be a dominant sect. That these two 
 claims are mutually exclusive it needs no logic to 
 prove. The knot that connects it with a State re- 
 cognising the equal status of all its citizens may be 
 cut, it cannot be untied. Already we see the Church 
 virtually subsiding into that same attitude of proud 
 isolation to the national religion that the Royal 
 Academy bears to art, or the Royal Society to science, 
 or our City Companies to the artisans of our day. 
 The same fate has overtaken it which overtakes all 
 old corporations. The form has survived the essence, 
 the letter of the trust has killed the spirit If this 
 stagnation were peculiar to the Church, we might look
 
 172 Growth of the Idea of Religious Neutrality. 
 
 out to reform it ; but, finding the same tendency in 
 all chartered corporations, we set it down to a law 
 of decay, common to all societies. It compels us to 
 conclude that the only remedy for this isolation 
 consists in breaking down the monopoly of State 
 patronage, behind which this dominant and exclusive 
 Church entrenches itself. We are driven to conclude 
 that as Academies have done so little for art, and 
 Societies for true science, the policy of the State is to 
 give over this indirect form of patronage. Bounties, 
 as Adam Smith long ago pointed out, do not foster 
 the growth of trade. They may give it an impulse 
 at first ; but, if long continued, their effect is disastrous 
 in the long run. Much more is this the case with 
 religion. It lived down the age of persecution, but 
 it was the age of protection beginning with Constantine 
 which killed its growth. To some extent we see this, 
 and therefore tolerate the competition of Free Churches ; 
 but we do not see the truth to its full extent, or we 
 should call for a surrender of that charter by which 
 one sect is given the exclusive right to represent the 
 nation in its religious affairs. In this respect we still 
 lag behind the rest of Europe, and are far behind our 
 own Colonies, where, after trying concurrent endow- 
 ment, the only basis recognised is that of the complete 
 neutrality of the State in all religious affairs.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 THE CHURCH DEFENCE ARGUMENT. 
 
 THE strength of the attack can only be measured by 
 that of the defence. There is a stage in every siege at 
 which the engineer becomes virtually commander-in- 
 chief. No assault is ordered till he gives the word that 
 it is practicable until he has calculated every con- 
 tingency, and has provided that in no case is the garrison 
 strong enough to beat off the attack. Hence it is that 
 the cry for Disestablishment has drawn out a counter 
 effort on the part of Church defenders. The existence 
 of an attacking party has called out a party in defence 
 of Establishments. Threatened institutions, it is said, 
 live long ; and the reason for this remark is this, that it 
 is only when threatened that the reasons for the institu- 
 tion become apparent to many minds. The majority of 
 mankind only reason ex post facto ; or, as Dr. Newman 
 once put it, they set out with their principles derived 
 from authority, tradition, and so forth, and then proceed 
 to find arguments to support them. Their reasons are 
 thus preposterous, in the strict sense of the word ; they 
 put what is last first, and what is logically first is to 
 them last. Their real reason for supporting an institu- 
 tion is that it exists, and whatever exists has a sufficient 
 reason for existing. But a reason of this kind has a
 
 174 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 flavour of the old ontological school. Some argument, 
 must be found, therefore, beyond the bare fact that it 
 exists, and this it is which explains the rise of a Church 
 Defence party at the time when the institution is 
 threatened. 
 
 Another consideration must not be overlooked before 
 we state the case on the other side. There is a zeit 
 geist, or spirit of the age, which has a law of its own, like 
 that of the winds, which we can to some extent forecast 
 but in no sense control. This current of public opinion 
 directs the thoughts of men to an extent they are 
 scarcely aware of, and makes up the common-place 
 philosophy of the majority of mankind. Till about the 
 end of last century, it was a fixed principle everywhere 
 that religion was an affair of State control and patron- 
 age. It was the duty of the State to uphold truth ; it 
 had a consequent right to decide what was truth. To 
 question this was to degrade the State into a mere 
 police institution. Even in the United States, whose 
 constitution since the Declaration of Independence is 
 based on the non-intervention principle in Church affairs, 
 this was by no means the case until the Revolution era. 
 So heartily is this non-intervention principle accepted 
 at present, and so unhesitatingly is it maintained, that 
 he who should deny it would find it hard to gain a 
 hearing, and would be suspected of holding an attitude 
 unfriendly towards popular liberty itself. " It belongs 
 to American liberty," says Lieber, " to separate entirely 
 from the political government the institution which has 
 for its object the support and diffusion of religion. 
 But, as has been well remarked, the broad line of de- 
 marcation between the opinions of to-day and those
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 175 
 
 which prevailed a century ago can nowhere be more 
 distinctly traced than precisely at this point, and 
 the contrast that is presented deserves the more atten- 
 tion for the reason that it has hardly been touched upon 
 with sufficient discrimination even by our best his- 
 torians."* That in all the colonies, previous to the 
 Revolution, there existed a connection, more or less 
 close, between religion and the State, is a fact often 
 repeated and sufficiently familiar. Such a connection 
 may be established in two ways negatively, by means 
 of tests excluding from public office or the civil fran- 
 chise the professors of a certain faith ; or, positively, by 
 means of legislation providing for religious establish- 
 ments or for the support of public worship. The 
 thirteen colonies afforded illustrations of all these 
 modes. In all there existed religious tests ; even Dela- 
 ware and Pennsylvania, the most liberal of all, denied 
 the f&nchise to those who did not profess faith in Jesus 
 Christ. Throughout the Southern colonies the Church 
 of England enjoyed a legal recognition. Into Georgia, 
 where the social influences which operated further 
 North hardly found a place, it was introduced by the 
 second Royal Governor, unmindful of the principles 
 which the wise foresight of Locke had sought to fix in 
 the "Grand Model." South Carolina had taken the 
 first step in the same direction before the close of the 
 seventeenth century. In North Carolina it had found a 
 place, though with meagre results, early in the eighteenth 
 century. In Virginia it was coeval with the civil 
 constitution ; and in Maryland, originally founded on 
 the principle of complete toleration, it had so far 
 * See some suggestive remarks in North American Review, Jan., 1876.
 
 176 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 triumphed that, in the colony which Calvert had planted, 
 the rites of the Church of Rome could no longer be 
 celebrated. In Jersey and New York, where the Church 
 was not established, it basked in the sunshine of an 
 official countenance, which secured it a hardly inferior 
 advantage. Yet all this was but an attempt to trans- 
 plant into the New World institutions which, in the 
 Old, were already smitten with decay. The Establish- 
 ment remained a sickly exotic, striking no deep roots into 
 the soil, and it almost withered away when scorched by 
 the fervent heat of the Revolutionary epoch. In the 
 New England States there grew up the idea of the 
 indissoluble alliance between the spiritual and the civil 
 order. It was not a theocracy such as Calvin attempted 
 in Geneva, and the Puritans and Presbyterians sought 
 to reproduce in England and Scotland ; it was rather 
 the theory, not so much of one broad and comprehen- 
 sive Church, as of the concurrent endowment of all reli- 
 gions within certain limits. Religion and education were 
 alike essential to the welfare of the State, and it was 
 equally the concern of the State to see that both should 
 flourish. When the number of Dissenters from the 
 early faith had sufficiently increased, the law was 
 modified so as to allow each separate congregation 
 to claim its proportion of the ecclesiastical tax for the 
 support of a clergyman of its own persuasion. It 
 contemplated no exclusive privilege. 
 
 Even the Revolution did not at once bring in the new 
 principle of the necessary separation of Church and 
 State. On the contrary, in every one of the new 
 constitutions framed under the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, with the single exception of New York, some
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 177 
 
 connection of Church and State was expresslyrecognised. 
 The Baptists, it is true, had consistently and all along 
 protested against this State support to religion, and the 
 year before the first blood of the Revolution was shed 
 at Lexington no less than eighteen members of a 
 Baptist church were imprisoned in Northampton gaol 
 for refusing to pay ministerial rates. So little disposed 
 were the leaders of the Revolution to accept modern 
 ideas on the subject, that John Adams declared that 
 "a change in the solar system might be expected as 
 soon as a change in the ecclesiastical system of Massa- 
 chusetts." The remark of Judge Story is to the same 
 effect : " That it yet remained a problem to be solved 
 in human affairs whether any free government can be 
 permanent where the public worship of God and the 
 support of religion constitute no part of the policy or 
 duty of the State." 
 
 The silent revolution which passed over American 
 society on the subject of the connection of Church and 
 State was owing to three causes : i. The conscientious 
 objection of certain sects, such as the Baptist, to receive 
 any public support or recognition. 2. The number of 
 religious organisations widely differing in doctrine and 
 worship, rendering it difficult to decide which of these 
 bodies was to be the organ of the religious conscious- 
 ness of the nation. But the principal element in the 
 change was the influence of Mr. Jefferson, who suc- 
 ceeded in introducing into the Virginia Act of 1785 the 
 principle that no religious tests should ever be required 
 as a qualification for any office or public trust under the 
 United States. The first amendment further provided 
 that Congress shall make no law respecting an Estab- 
 
 12
 
 178 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 lishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise 
 thereof. Laws for the support of public worship 
 lingered in Connecticut till 1816, and in Massachusetts 
 till 1833, and religious tests in several States for a few 
 years longer. But public opinion, from which all laws 
 proceed, at length decided that the State, in its essence, 
 was a purely political organism. 
 
 Thus it is a silent revolution in public sentiment as 
 to the connection of Church and State has been wit- 
 nessed during the past century. It has been completed 
 in America, and only waits its completion in this 
 country as soon as an impulse strong enough to overcome 
 the -vis inertia has been given. This impulse is coming 
 in this country through the rise of what are called 
 Church principles. There is a rising tide of opinion 
 coming in from all quarters, and which is so general 
 that we can only describe it as a mental epidemic. 
 This spirit claims for the Church a Divine original, and 
 desires to assert its independence of State control. It 
 is found as much in the ultra-Protestant Kirk of Scotland 
 as in the ultra-Clerical Church of Rome. In both cases 
 these Churches are willing to accept endowments of the 
 State, but it must be on their own terms. There is to 
 be no reciprocity in the arrangement. The State may 
 have its duties towards the true Church, but it has no 
 corresponding rights growing out of the power of the 
 purse or the right of the patron to lay down the terms 
 on which the temporalities are given. What it gives is 
 given without reserve or limitation. It is laid on 
 bended knee on God's altar, and to touch it again is 
 sacrilege ; to require of the priest who lives by the altar 
 submission to the civil supremacy is tyranny and
 
 Tlie Church Defence Argument. 179 
 
 oppression. The modern school of Church defenders 
 actually go so far as to say that the State never has 
 endowed the Church ; that these endowments were the 
 gifts of pious founders ; that as private gifts they 
 passed into the hands of a spiritual corporation known 
 as the Church, and all that the State has ever done is 
 to guarantee the clergy in the enjoyment of their 
 endowments on the condition of complying with the 
 terms of the trust. This is the new theory of the con- 
 nection of Church and State which is rapidly replacing 
 the old. It is, no doubt, set up by men who take a 
 shrewd view of the state of affairs, and who wish to be 
 prepared for coming events. They see that the old 
 theory of the duty of the State maintaining Divine 
 truth is dead. It is as dangerous to lean on it as for 
 Israel to go down to Egypt and lean on that bruised 
 reed Pharaoh. The State, then, no longer offering the 
 support to the endowment principle, for which alone 
 an Establishment is worth contending, they have looked 
 out for a new support, and found it in the Divine 
 character of the Church. They describe the Church as a 
 corporation with a perpetual succession in itself, and 
 able, therefore, to hand on its trusts and endowments 
 from generation to generation. This is the new point 
 of departure of the Church party. We wish to state it 
 in their own words, and to give them all the benefit 
 of their own view of their position. 
 
 The old school used to put the relation of endow- 
 ment to establishment in this order that the State first 
 established the Church and then endowed it The 
 assumption was that the duty of the State being to 
 maintain truth, it looked out among the sects to find 
 
 122
 
 i8o The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 which of them maintained the truth in its purest form, 
 and then decided on entering into an alliance with that. 
 It was a case of marriage, in which the bridegroom first 
 selects his bride for her beauty, accomplishments, and 
 suitability of temper ; and then, having decided on 
 making her his wife, provides for her a suitable dower 
 becoming so high a match. Thus it is that the greater 
 the State, the more ample the provision for the clergy 
 a dignified Establishment and a liberal endowment 
 being assumed to go together. The new school of 
 Church defenders reverse this account of the matter. 
 They put the Establishment question altogether in the 
 background, and lay stress only on the endowment. 
 They deny altogether the Warburton theory of the 
 Alliance. They say that it is a fiction to assume that 
 the State made choice of one out of several sects as 
 the possible bride of the State, and then proceeded to 
 provide for her a suitable dower. Appealing to history, 
 they say that the Church was dowered by her own sons, 
 and that the State has done little more than to regulate 
 and even to confiscate these endowments from time to 
 time. Henry VIII. did so in England ; the French 
 Republic in the same way issued assignats on the 
 Church lands ; and so in Prussia the revenues of the 
 Church in Silesia, Westphalia, and elsewhere, have been 
 seized by the State. They deny that the scanty 
 stipends now paid to the clergy in Prussia and France 
 are of the nature of endowments. They are simply 
 giving back to the Church what is her own, and even of 
 that only a beggarly dole. To attach burdensome condi- 
 tions to these State-paid stipends, as the Falk laws are 
 now doing, is, we are told, only to add insult to injury.
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 181 
 
 The brigand who takes a purse, and then restores to the 
 traveller enough to carry him on to the next inn, 
 scarcely lays claim to much generosity ; but suppose in 
 addition he were to lay claim to be regarded as a bene- 
 factor, we should say that this was to add cant to 
 extortion. On these grounds the Clerical party on the 
 Continent deny that they are either endowed or estab- 
 lished. They admit to their sorrow that they are 
 stipendiaries of the State ; but this only means that 
 the State has confiscated their Church lands, and left 
 them a bare pittance of their own patrimony on which 
 to eke out existence. The Pope, as it is well known, 
 still stands out against those terms ; and as long as 
 Peter's pence flow into the Papal treasury he is not 
 likely to acknowledge himself to be the pensioner of the 
 King of Italy. The Prince Bishops of Germany have 
 long since had to come down to these terms, and to eat 
 the bread of dependence ; but how much they chafe 
 under it the attitude taken up by the clerical party in 
 Germany is sufficient evidence. It is the same in 
 France ; and now we see something like the same spirit 
 beginning to show itself among the English clergy. 
 They admit that they are established by the State 
 that fact it would be difficult to deny as long as bishops 
 sit in the House of Lords and that no other religion 
 is officially recognised as the national religion but the 
 Anglican. But they refuse to admit that they are 
 endowed by the State. The endowments, they say, are 
 the property of the Church given in a sense, it is true, 
 by the nation, but not by the State. Church lands, 
 they maintain, in the majority of cases, were the gifts of 
 pious founders. So with the buildings they were
 
 1 82 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 erected in many, if not in all, cases by voluntary gifts. 
 Their maintenance has, it is true, by the common law, 
 been thrown on the inhabitants of the parish, and for 
 this rates have been levied till the other day. But the 
 abolition of rates has altered even this, and now the 
 maintenance of the buildings falls on those only who 
 are of choice members of the Church. 
 
 There is one pointy however, which this new theory 
 of the non-endowment of the Church by the State does 
 not meet. We have never seen the case of the com- 
 pulsory nature of tithes fairly met. Whatever may be 
 said as to the origin of tithes as free-will offerings, there 
 is no doubt that it is only by a figure of speech that 
 they can be called endowments. They may more pro- 
 perly be described as an ancient tax, the obligation to 
 pay which sprang out of public authority modified by 
 practice, the limits and privileges of which were from 
 time to time laid down by public authority, and the 
 enforcement of which has in the last resort depended 
 upon courts in which public authority is enthroned. 
 The stages by which a voluntary offering like tithes be- 
 came customary, then compulsory, and finally took the 
 form in which we find them, extended from praedial 
 to personal tithes, such as the wages of an agricultural 
 labourer. By a constitution of Archbishop Winchelsea, 
 for instance, it is ordained that personal tithes shall be 
 paid of artificers and merchandisers that is, of the 
 gain of their commerce and also of carpenters, smiths, 
 masons, weavers, innkeepers, and alt other workmen and 
 hirelings, that they pay tithes of their wages, unless such 
 hireling shall give something in certain to the use or for 
 the light of the church, if the rector shall so think
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 183 
 
 proper.* Here we see ecclesiastical law in the act of 
 throwing out its net, and enclosing within its meshes 
 even the wages of the day labourer the bare subsist- 
 ence money of the poorest class of all, even that is pre- 
 sumed to be titheable. Statute law, then, follows partly 
 to confirm, partly to restrain, the harshness of eccle- 
 siastical law. By the statute of 2 and 3 Ed. VI., cap. 
 13, sec. 7, the force of this law on personal tithes was 
 limited to such as " heretofore within these forty years 
 have accustomably used to pay such personal tithes, or 
 of right ought to pay, other than such as be common 
 day labourers." Hunting, hawking, angling, and fowling 
 fell under the rules of personal tithes, as also did sea- 
 fishing, when, unless a clear custom to the contrary 
 could be established, the tithe of fish taken in the sea 
 was payable to the parson of the parish where the 
 fisherman resided. It is clear from these instances, 
 which it would be easy to add to, that what was cus- 
 tomary at first, became, in course of time, compulsory, 
 and ecclesiastical law soon acquired the force of statute 
 law. This arose from the nature of things. It is vain 
 for one side to deplore that it was so, and for the other 
 to deny the fact. The fact and its explanation are alike 
 simple. All law is only the reflection of custom in 
 other words, the ideas of the age are given statutory 
 force. Laws are barbarous in an age emerging from 
 barbarism, and so in an ecclesiastical age the statute- 
 book reflects the mind and opinions of an age saturated 
 
 * On the subject of the origin of tithes, and the growth of a customary 
 into a statutory right to enforce the collection of tithes, whether predial 
 or personal, great or small, mixed tithes and tithes of agistment, see 
 "Title Deeds of English Church," by E. Miall, Esq. Third Edition. 
 1872.
 
 184 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 with ecclesiastical ideas. To complain of our fore- 
 fathers for lending themselves to the support of the 
 compulsory principle in religion is to show little his- 
 torical insight into past ages. On the other hand, to 
 deny the existence of these ideas, and to represent the 
 wealth of the Church as the accretion of gifts bestowed 
 by pious founders, is to show even less insight into the 
 past. Our forefathers, in giving statutory force to eccle- 
 siastical claims to endowment, thought they were doing 
 God service, and would have learned with surprise that 
 one section of the community in our day denied that 
 they were doing God service, while another party went 
 further still, and denied the fact altogether. They had 
 none of those Permissive Bills, out of which one side 
 could contract itself, as we do in our modern legislation. 
 What we call persecution they would have described as 
 wholesome discipline. The knife and the cautery were 
 applied to the cancer of religious error in a way which 
 we should dread to do. Their surgery we should call 
 butchery ; but it is absurd to deny that it was surgery 
 because it was barbarous, and doubly absurd to deny 
 the fact that they used the knife and the fire in a way 
 which we now shudder to think of. 
 
 Precisely the same change in the zeit geist\&& passed 
 over the age with regard to a compulsory provision for 
 religion. Church defenders wince under the remark 
 that tithes have a statutory force exactly in the same 
 way as Church censures against heresy were enforced 
 by the State. The statute de heretico comburendo was 
 first enforced by the Church, then enacted by the State; 
 at last it fell into disuse, and finally by 29 Charles II. 
 it became virtually a dead letter, by being remanded
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 185 
 
 entirely to the Ecclesiastical Courts, the Civil Courts re- 
 fusing any longer to take cognisance of heresy, as such. 
 This is the death-blow to the principle of persecution, 
 the essence of persecution lying in the fact of a man 
 enduring civil penalties for his religious opinions. It is 
 no persecution to attach religious penalties for religious 
 opinions ; that is only the discipline which every society 
 presumably may exercise on its own members. But 
 when the discipline is enforced by the State, and attaches 
 to the member in his capacity as a citizen, then we have 
 a case of persecution. The spirit of the age condemns 
 persecution, and no Churchman, whatever his theory of 
 Establishment or State connection be, would imperil 
 his own case by allowing the compulsory principle in 
 religion to extend to forfeiture of goods and liberty, or 
 even of civil status. We all draw the line at toleration, 
 and persecution is an ugly word /given up to opprobrium 
 even by State Churchmen. But the majority who re- 
 peat the cuckoo phrase toleration are unable to see its 
 logical equivalent the indifference of the State to all 
 religious questions. We are willing to repeat, in the 
 words of the Liturgy, that the Queen may " minister 
 justice indifferently ;" but we are unable to face the 
 meaning of our own words. If the sovereign is to put 
 no difference between man and man in distributing 
 justice, she is equally bound to put an end to the re- 
 mains of religious inequality which still exist among 
 us. If this be so, then what becomes of the ascend- 
 ancy which one sect still claims in the country ? It 
 seems to be admitted on all sides that it can only hold 
 its position on some other ground than the compulsory 
 principle, and this new ground is sought and found in
 
 1 86 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 the theory of the Church being an ancient corporation 
 coeval with the State, holding property and transmitting 
 what it received by gift and endowment in perpetual 
 succession, in the same way as any other chartered com- 
 pany or private proprietor hands down his estates from 
 generation to generation. 
 
 The new argument for the Church is this : that since 
 it was not established or set up by the State created, 
 that is, and constituted as a National Church it cannot 
 be uncreated or disestablished. No one has stated this 
 more clearly than Mr. Freeman. His contention is, 
 that the ecclesiastical endowments of England have 
 grown up bit by bit. 
 
 "In short, if we wish to argue this question on its true ground, we must 
 put out of sight the popular notion that, at some time or other, the State 
 determined to make a general national endowment of religion. And we 
 must also put out of sight the other popular notion that, at some time or 
 other, the State took certain funds from one religious body and gave them 
 to another. Neither of these things ever happened. If there ever was a 
 time when the State determined on a general national Establishment of 
 religion, it must have been at the time of the conversion of the English 
 nation to Christianity. But the conversion of England took place gradu- 
 ally, when there was no such thing as an English nation capable of a 
 national act. The land was still cut up into small kingdoms, and Kent 
 had been Christian for some generations at a time when Sussex still 
 remained heathen. If any act which could be called a systematic establish- 
 ment and endowment of the Church ever took place anywhere, it certainly 
 took place in each particular kingdom for itself, not in England as a whole. 
 The churches of Canterbury and Rochester undoubtedly held lands while 
 men in Sussex still worshipped Woden. But it would be an abuse of 
 language to apply such words as systematic establishment and endow- 
 ment to the irregular process by which the ecclesiastical corporations 
 received their possessions. The process began in the earliest times, and it 
 has gone on ever since. And nothing was done systematically at any time. 
 This king or that earl founded or enriched this or that church in which he 
 felt a special interest ; and from this it naturally followed that one church 
 was much more richly endowed than another. The nearest approach to a 
 regular general endowment is the tithe, and this is not a very near approach. 
 The tithe can hardly be said to have been granted by the State. The state 
 of the case rather is that the Church preached the payment of tithe as a
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 187 
 
 duty, and that the State gradually came to enforce the duty by legal sanc- 
 tions. But it is only by the Tithe Commutation Act that tithe has been 
 put wholly on the same level as other property; As long as tithe could be 
 recovered by a process in an ecclesiastical court, there was still something of 
 its original nature hanging about it. The theory of the ecclesiastical court 
 is that they ssApro salute animce, for the soul's health of the person brought 
 before the court. The aim of their punishment is the reformation of the 
 offender. In theory the tithe-stealer was brought before the court, not 
 that the defrauded rector might recover his property, but that the man who 
 had sinned by not paying his tithe might be brought to a better frame of 
 mind. So with regard to the Church-rate, which was a payment for eccle- 
 siastical purposes, though it was not in any strict sense Church property or 
 property at all. Here, too, the old process was through the ecclesiastical 
 court, with the same theoretical object, the reformation of the defaulter. 
 In neither case did the State strictly make a grant ; it rather enforced the 
 decree of the Church by the secular arm. And as to tithe, it should also 
 be remembered that, though the duty of paying tithe was taught very early, 
 yet for a long time the tithe-payer had a good deal of choice as to the 
 particular ecclesiastical body to which he would pay his tithe. Nothing 
 was more common than an arbitrary grant of tithe to this or that religious 
 house. In short, the ecclesiastical endowments of England have grown 
 up, like everything else in England, bit by bit. A number of ecclesiastical 
 corporations have been endowed at all manner of times and in all manner 
 of ways ; but there was no one particular moment when the State of 
 England determined to endow one general religious body called the Church 
 of England. 
 
 "And if there was no one particular moment when, as many people 
 fancy, the State endowed the Church by a deliberate act, still less was there 
 any moment when the State, as many people fancy, took the Church pro- 
 perty from one religious body and gave it to another. The whole argument 
 must assume, because the facts of history compel us to assume, the absolute 
 identity of the Church of England after the Reformation with the Church of 
 England before the Reformation. We are not talking theology ; it is quite 
 possible to argue, either from the Roman Catholic or from the Protestant 
 side, that the Reformation really made so great a theological change that 
 the religious body which existed after those changes cannot be said to be 
 the same religious body as that which existed before them. With this 
 theological argument, from whichever side it comes, we have nothing 
 whatever to do. Our position is a much humbler one. It is simply 
 that, whether the religious body did or did not so change theologically 
 as no longer to be the same, yet, as a matter of law and history, as a 
 matter of plain fact, there was no taking from one religious body and 
 giving to another. We must remember that there was not in England, 
 as some people seem to think, and as there really was in some foreign 
 countries, some one act done at a definite time called the 'Reforma- 
 tion.' Under the name of the Reformation we jumble together a great
 
 1 88 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 number of changes spread over many years. In popular language the 
 Reformation sometimes means the throwing off of the authority of the 
 Pope, sometimes the suppression of the monasteries, sometimes the 
 actual religious changes, the putting forth of the English Prayer-book 
 and the Articles of Religion. Here are three sets of changes, all of 
 which are undoubtedly connected as results of a general spirit of 
 change ; but, as a matter of fact, they were acts done by different 
 people, at different times, and those who, at any stage, wrought one 
 change had no thought that the others would follow. The final results 
 might be that theological continuity was broken, but no act was done 
 by which legal and historical continuity was broken. Any lawyer must 
 know that, though Pole succeeded Cranmer and Parker succeeded Pole, 
 yet nothing was done to break the uninterrupted succession of the Arch- 
 bishopric of Canterbury as a corporation sole in the eye of the law. This 
 is all that we mean ; in the sixteenth century, as at several other times 
 before and since, laws were made to which the holders of ecclesiastical 
 benefices had to conform under pain of losing those benefices. As a matter 
 of fact, the great mass of their holders did conform through all changes. 
 There was much less than people commonly think even of taking from one 
 person and giving to another ; and the general taking from one religious 
 body and giving to another, which many people fancy took place under 
 Henry VIII. or Elizabeth, simply never happened at all. In this last 
 statement we wish to be thoroughly well understood. We are not wishing 
 in any way to undervalue the greatness either of the direct theological 
 change or of the indirect changes of all kinds which followed on the long 
 series of events known as the English Reformation. In a general view of 
 history these changes cannot be rated too highly. They were changes far 
 greater than those who made them dreamed of. But we are dealing with 
 a dry matter of fact and of law; There was no one particular moment, 
 called the Reformation, at which the State of England determined to take 
 property from one Church or set of people and give it to another. As 
 there was no systematic endowment in the sixth or seventh century, still 
 less was there any systematic disendowment and re-endowment in the 
 sixteenth." 
 
 Thus, according to Mr. Freeman, there was no parti- 
 cular moment when, as many people fancy, the State 
 endowed the Church by a deliberate act ; still less was 
 there any moment when the State, as many people 
 fancy, took the Church property from one body and 
 gave it to another. Both these statements are very 
 questionable, and it would be easy to produce a long 
 list of Acts of Parliament directly bearing on the
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 189 
 
 endowment of one particular Church, and that to the 
 exclusion of every other. Let us glance at a few 
 of these facts. Passing over pre-Reformation times, 
 we open the Statute Book at the reign of the first 
 Protestant King : 
 
 "The first law on this subject was passed in the reign of Edward VI., 
 in which all persons were commanded to attend their parish church and re- 
 ceive the sacraments upon pain of excommunication, or such other punish- 
 ment as the Ecclesiastical Judge might inflict. This was followed by the 
 Act of Uniformity of 1551, commanding all persons to resort to their 
 parish church upon pain of censure and the forfeiture of one shilling for 
 every offence. Next came another Act of Elizabeth,* providing that 
 any persons above the age of sixteen, who should be absent from church 
 for a month, or should persuade others to absent themselves from church 
 and repair to conventicles, or should join any conventicle, should be com- 
 mitted to prison without bail, until they should conform, make submission, 
 attend the service established by law, and make declaration of their con- 
 formity. If they should refuse within three months to do this, they were 
 required to abjure and depart the realm as felons. The form of submis- 
 sion was as follows : 
 
 " ' I, A. B., do humbly confess and acknowledge that I have grievously 
 offended God, in contemning Her Majesty's godly and lawful government 
 and authority, by absenting myself from church, and from hearing Divine 
 service, contrary to the godly laws and statutes of this realm, and in using 
 and frequenting disordered and unlawful conventicles and assemblies, under 
 pretence and colour of exercise of religion ; and I am heartily sorry for the 
 same, and do acknowledge and testify in my conscience that no other 
 person hath or ought to have any power or authority over Her Majesty ; 
 and I do promise and protest, without any dissimulation, or any colour or 
 means of any dispensation, that from henceforth I will, from time to time, 
 obey and perform Her Majesty's laws and statutes, in repairing to the 
 church, and hearing Divine service, and do my uttermost endeavour to 
 maintain and defend the same.' 
 
 "By a singular confusion of equity, any ' recusant ' either abjuring or 
 not abjuring the realm equally forfeited all his goods and chattels to the 
 State. In the following reign an Act f was passed inflicting a fine of ten 
 pounds upon every person who should harbour others who did not attend 
 the services of the Church. These laws were strengthened in the reign of 
 Charles II., when an Act % was passed providing that any person above the 
 age of sixteen who should be present at a conventicle where five or more 
 persons were assembled, should, for the first offence, be imprisoned for 
 three months, or fined five pounds ; for the second offence, be imprisoned 
 
 * 35 c. i. t 3 J as - I- c - 4- J J 6 Car. II. c. 4.
 
 IQO The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 for six months, or be fined ten pounds ; and for the third offence, be trans- 
 ported for seven years. This Act remained in force for three years, soon 
 after the conclusion of which another* was passed inflicting fines upon 
 those attending conventicles and upon the preachers, and authorising the 
 magistrates to break open any house in which there was such conventicle, 
 and take the offenders into custody. How, notwithstanding the fearful 
 sufferings inflicted by the execution of these laws, they utterly failed of 
 their purpose, is known to every reader. Nonconformity grew, and con- 
 venticles were multiplied in spite of them, until, at last, the nation being 
 weary equally of ecclesiastical and political tyranny, exiled the Stuarts, and 
 passed the Toleration Act. For years after this, however, no Noncon- 
 formist preacher could exercise his ministry excepting under certain restric- 
 tions designed to protect the doctrines of the Church as established by Act 
 of Parliament. The law now protects all, but gives special and characteristic 
 facilities to the Established Church." 
 
 Take, again, the provision made for securing the 
 edifices for public worship : 
 
 " It was the common law that all churches should be repaired by 
 the parishioners, and this law was not abolished until the year 1867. Any 
 person could build a church, but it could not be used for public worship 
 until it had been consecrated by the bishop of the diocese, with the consent 
 of the Crown, in which it was situated, nor until a sufficient maintenance 
 for the minister had been secured. After the Reformation, the deeds of 
 gift of the founders were enrolled in Chancery, according to the statute 
 of Henry VIII. (27 c. 16), passed for the enrolment of all bargains, 
 sales, &c. 
 
 " EARLY CHURCH BUILDING ACTS. 
 
 " The first Act of Parliament dealing with church edifices was that of 
 Charles II. f for the rebuilding of the City of London after the great fire. 
 It is also the first Act for levying a rate for church building. It 
 directed that thirty-nine of the old churches should be rebuilt, and that 
 the old sites of the buildings should be sold for that purpose. Very soon 
 followed another Act J levying an imposition on the importation of coals for 
 the rebuilding of St. Paul's and other church edifices, and directing that 
 the number of parish churches to be rebuilt should be fifty-one. Next 
 came an Act reviving and continuing the previous Act so far as the ex- 
 penses connected with St. Paul's were concerned, charging so much a 
 chaldron for that purpose upon coals delivered into London, such charge 
 to be paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the reign of William 
 there is found a further Act|| to the same purport; and in the reign of 
 Anne a similar Act. IT Next came a statute of wider purpose,** entitled 
 
 * 22 Car. II. c. I. f 19 Car. II. c. 3. $22 Car II. c. n. I Jas. II. c. II. 
 || 8 & 9 Wm. III. c. 14. IT i Anne, s. 2, c. 12 ** 9 Anne, c. 22.
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 191 
 
 'An Act for granting to Her Majesty several duties upon coals for 
 building fifty new churches in and about the cities of London and West- 
 minster and suburbs thereof,' which authorised a levy of two shillings a 
 chaldron or ton upon coals for that purpose. Another Act* of the same 
 reign extended the power of previous Acts, which was followed by still 
 another, f 
 
 "ACTS OF THE GEORGES. 
 
 " Next, and very naturally, came an Act of Geo. I. for making pro- 
 vision for the ministers of the fifty new churches, which was directed to 
 be done by an additional imposition upon the coal rates. Another Act 
 of the same reignj not only extended the power of those that had pre- 
 viously been passed, but established a lottery for the further raising of money 
 for this purpose, with specific directions as to how the lottery was to be 
 conducted. There were two or three other Acts passed in the reign of 
 Geo. II. ; but in the reign of Geo. III. the Church Building Acts became 
 numerous. The first is for repairing Westminster Abbey from the funds 
 of the Treasury. Later, came one|| entitled 'An Act to promote the 
 building, repairing, or otherwise providing of churches and chapels, and 
 of houses for the residences of ministers, and the providing of churchyards 
 and glebes,' which simply gave facilities for private persons to endow a 
 church with land, or goods, or chattels, the intent being as follows : 
 ' Likewise a sufficient number of churches and chapels for the celebration of 
 Divine service, according to the rites and ceremonies of the United Church 
 of England and Ireland, and of mission houses with competent glebes for 
 the residences of ministers officiating in such churches and chapels, is 
 necessary towards the promotion of religion and morality, and whereas the 
 same are either wholly wanting or materially deficient in many parts of 
 England and Ireland,' and so on. This Act did not succeed in its purpose, 
 and, therefore, was followed by another^!" providing that the king himself, 
 out of the Crown property, might grant lands for building or repairing any 
 church or chapel, or house of residence for the minister. 
 
 "THE CHURCH BUILDING COMMISSION ACTS. 
 
 " Even this, however, was not deemed to be sufficient. The next year 
 another Act was passed to give further facilities. By the 58 Geo. III. c. 45 
 (A.D. 1818) the Treasury was empowered to raise the sum of a million 
 sterling for ' building, and promoting the building of additional churches 
 in populous parishes,' which Act, at the same time, established the body 
 termed the Church Building Commission, since merged (1856) into the 
 Ecclesiastical Commission. The operations of this Act have been detailed 
 in the several reports of the Church Building Commissioners, by which it 
 appears that through the powers invested in the Commission, with the 
 money provided by Parliament, aided by contributions from other sources, 
 numbers of churches were built in various parts of the kingdom." 
 
 * 10 Anne, c. it. f I2 Anne, c. 17. 5 Geo. I. c. 9. 6 Geo. III. c. 25. 
 || 43 Geo. III. c. 108. f 57 Geo. III. c. 115.
 
 192 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 But we have stated enough to show the strength 
 and the weakness of the new argument which meets 
 the objections to a State Establishment by boldly 
 denying the fact. The difference, it has been said, be- 
 tween the sceptics of the old school and the new is 
 this that the one denied the evidential value of the 
 Christian miracles, the other their credibility. In early 
 times no one denied the facts themselves ; it is only 
 in our age that they dispute not so much the inference 
 as the original fact. Precisely so with State con- 
 nection. The principle was admitted formerly, but 
 the fact that it worked prejudicially in favour of one 
 dominant sect was evaded. Now that there is no 
 denying the principle that religious inequality is con- 
 trary to the spirit of the age, Church defenders turn 
 round and dispute the fact that the Church is endowed 
 and established by the State. They do not deny that 
 it is endowed that would be too preposterous ; but 
 they contend that those endowments came not from the 
 State, but were the benefactions of pious founders. Then, 
 again, with regard to the Establishment theory, they 
 admit that the Church is established i.e., settled in 
 the enjoyment of certain favours from the State not 
 shared in by other religious bodies ; but they say these 
 are nothing to the favours enjoyed by the mediaeval 
 Church. If the Church of our day is a privileged and, 
 to some extent, a dominant Church, what is this 
 to the privileges enjoyed by the Church before the 
 Reformation ? Besides, as they add, the Church pays 
 a dear price for these favours ; " Give us back our own, 
 restore to us the monastic and other Church lands con- 
 fiscated by that arch-robber of churches, Henry VIII.,
 
 TJte Church Defence Argument. 193 
 
 and we shall be only too glad to set up on our 
 own foundation, and to forego all the favours and 
 immunities of our State connection." As for the 
 advantages of the connection, Establishment is an 
 arrangement, as the zealous Churchman contends, much 
 more favourable to the State than the Church. " We 
 give," he says, " much more than we get. For a few 
 paltry privileges, such as a seat for our Bishops in 
 the House of Lords, we surrender the control of our 
 own revenues, the making of our own laws, and, in 
 a word, all the rights of self-government enjoyed by 
 the Free Churches." 
 
 Clearly, there is in this argument a surrender of the 
 principle of Establishments, and a preparation for 
 the Church taking up new ground when it shall be 
 finally separated from the State. The position which 
 the Church is now taking up on these questions, re- 
 sembles, in fact, that of the Royal Academy. Sir 
 Charles Dilke, in his speech on a motion of inquiry 
 into the management of the Royal Academy, quoted, 
 with great justice, a remark of Westmacott, " When we 
 wish not to be interfered with we are private ; when 
 we want anything we are public." This is the new 
 ground taken up by the Church party in our day. 
 When they want grants for their schools, on the deno- 
 minational principle, then they set up the claim that 
 the Church is national, and so the natural educator 
 of the poor. But when there is a question of touching 
 its revenues, or in any way redistributing them for 
 purposes more truly national than the public teaching 
 of a theology from which large masses of the people 
 dissent, then the ground is changed, and we are told 
 
 13
 
 194 The Church Defence Argtiment. 
 
 that the Church is a society holding the apostolic 
 succession, and enjoying certain revenues in right of 
 this tenure that the State did not give these reve- 
 nues, and has no right to confiscate them, or even 
 to deal with them as if they were national property. 
 The old school of High Churchmen were Erastian pur 
 sang, and admitted, in the words of Bishop Horsley, 
 that they enjoyed the temporalities of their office from 
 the favour of the Prince. The new school set up the 
 ecclesiastical supremacy argument, and abhor and 
 abjure the Erastianism of a bygone generation. But 
 we question whether' they are as logical and con- 
 sistent. They reject Caesarism, and put themselves 
 on the other horn of the dilemma, which is Cleri- 
 calism. Since they are not prepared to part with the 
 temporalities, and are at a loss to make out any other 
 case for retaining them, they set up this new claim, 
 that they are not public endowments but private bene- 
 factions. Instead of admitting that the State is the 
 owner, and they only the trustees, with a beneficiary 
 interest, they reverse the position, and claim to be 
 owners in absolute possession as well as beneficiaries, 
 and leave only the right to the State of interfering, 
 as in any other case of open breach of trust. 
 
 Thus the ground taken up by the Church Defence 
 party in our day is identical in principle with that of 
 the Ultramontane party on the Continent. They claim 
 the utmost independence from State control, but refuse, 
 at the same time, to relinquish the status and dignity of 
 an endowed Church. This was very much the ground 
 taken up by the Free Kirk party after the Disruption of 
 1 844. They did not recede from the position that it is
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 195 
 
 the duty of the magistrate to maintain truth and provide 
 for the emolument of its ministers, but they held that 
 in doing this the magistrate had discharged his duty, and 
 that the jus circa sacra lay entirely within the Church. 
 The temporalities might come from what source they 
 may, but the right to administer them was part of the 
 self-government inherent in the Church. It was this 
 inconsistency which tainted the whole case of the Free 
 Kirk party, and they are coming now to see it. In one 
 sense they were Voluntaries, in another not. They 
 wanted all the advantages of State recognition without 
 any of its drawbacks. They were thus t>pen to the 
 taunt of Lady Macbeth to her husband : 
 
 " What thou would'st highly, 
 That would'st thou holily ; would'st not play false, 
 And yet would'st wrongly win." 
 
 All but an insignificant minority of the Free Kirk 
 party in Scotland now see this. They have come to 
 see that it is no use to accept endowment and then rail 
 the seal from off the bond by denouncing, as Erastian- 
 ism, the only conditions on which endowment is 
 possible. It does not need Dogberry's wisdom to see 
 that when two are on horseback together one must sit 
 on the saddle in front, and one on the pillion behind. 
 We may drink to "Church and State," and not to 
 " State and Church," as they do in Germany ; but this 
 will not alter the fact that when Church and State are 
 allied in modern times the State leads and the Church 
 follows. The days have gone by when spiritual and 
 political power claimed to be co-ordinate, and when 
 the spiritual presumed to rule the secular. Even in 
 Hildebrand's times this claim was fiercely resisted ; it 
 
 132
 
 196 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 is now so out of date that those who cling to it, as the 
 modern Ultramontanes do, and a few antiquated Free 
 Kirk men like Dr. Begg, simply proclaim their inability 
 to read the signs of the times. There is only one 
 logical locus standi for a National or State Church, and 
 that is extreme and unqualified Erastianism. We are 
 not sure, indeed, that consistent State Churchmen do 
 not go further than Erastus even. The Hegelian law of 
 identity between Church and State, in which the Church 
 is only the inner side of the State, has been carried 
 one step farther by Rothe and the Heidelberg school. 
 It is a singular coincidence, accidental it may be, but 
 none the less remarkable, that in Heidelberg, where 
 Lieber, the body physician to the Elector Palatine, first 
 broached the theory of the supremacy of the State and 
 the subjection of the Church which the Presbyterians 
 of that day rejected with such abhorrence a new form 
 of Erastianism, still more offensive than the old, is now 
 the current theory. According to Rothe, the old dog- 
 matic Christianity is now as much out of date as 
 Judaism. It has done its work and played its part. 
 The residuum, or, as we might call it, its sublimated 
 essence in the form of a refined code of ethics, may 
 survive. This may be taught by State-paid teachers, 
 and thus we come round to the " moral policeman " 
 theory which was in fashion in this country a century 
 ago. Of this sublimated ethics we may say in the well- 
 known lines 
 
 " Unless above himself he can 
 Exalt himself, how mean is man." 
 
 An ethical system may be taken up and taught by 
 the State, and our religious teachers may be national
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 197 
 
 schoolmasters of the doctrines of sweetness and light so 
 dear to Church defenders of the type of Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold ; but the State will soon learn, to its surprise, 
 that it has paid a dear price for thus evacuating the 
 supernatural out of Christianity, and leaving a caput 
 mortuum of pure ethics to be taught by State-paid 
 functionaries. Ethics of this kind are of no more use 
 than a water-wheel and machinery attached to it with- 
 out the water power, and for this there must be a 
 fall of some kind. No mechanical skill can over- 
 come this original defect unless there are two levels, 
 and the water descends from one level to the other, 
 water power is out of the question. It is the same with 
 those moral forces on which the State relies to carry on 
 the machinery of government. The spiritual element 
 in religion must be there, or the ethical will soon come 
 to a standstill ; and this brings us to see how short- 
 sighted is the argument of Rothe and his school. They 
 assume the very point in question. Admitted that 
 ethical forces are enough for the ends of a State Church, 
 but what is to create and keep up these ethical forces ? 
 In China we see an elaborate educational hierarchy, 
 Confucianism, which, as an ethical system set in motion 
 by the State, and for secular ends, such as the State 
 must approve of, is all that we can wish if we take only 
 a mechanical view of life. But, judged by its results, 
 its dynamical effect is nil. It is the old difficulty how 
 to move the water which is to move the wheels of life. 
 A spiritual principle somehow is needed, and as the 
 State cannot supply this principle, we are brought back 
 to the problem we set out with, How are we to get it? 
 If it comes from a Divine source, if it is the water of
 
 1 98 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God 
 and of the Lamb, then we have the power ; it is a 
 power which we may utilise, if we will, but cannot produce. 
 We may fit it to our water-wheel or, rather, our water- 
 wheel to it but this is all. It will turn our driving- 
 wheel, and thus set the whole machinery of public life 
 and duty in motion ; but, having done us this good 
 turn, it goes on its way rejoicing past town and hamlet 
 it flows, and it foams, it winds, or it wanders, till it loses 
 itself at last in the ocean of God's universal love. 
 
 The last theory, then, of State connection with reli- 
 gion is thus at once the most logical and the most 
 absurd. The only terms of the connection which are 
 possible in our day are that the State shall control 
 religion, and use it for ethical purposes only. But a 
 religion from which the spiritual or independent 
 element is so evacuated loses all its force it becomes 
 like stagnant water, and useless even for the secondary 
 purposes for which it is wanted. We are driven, then, 
 to reject Erastianism as much in the dress of the 
 modern Heidelberg school as in that of the Heidelberg 
 of the times of the Elector Palatine and his body phy- 
 sician Lieber, commonly known as Erastus. The com- 
 promise we have arrived at in this country, though it is 
 less logical, is more practical than this. Here at least 
 we leave the Church free to teach spiritual truth in her 
 own way, and under such dogmatic forms as she thinks 
 fit. The State does not draw these up in the first 
 instance, or even define them. All that the Court of 
 Appeal does is to interpret their meaning when dis- 
 putes arise between contending schools of theology 
 within the Church. This theory of the connection
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 199 
 
 which stops short of extreme Erastianism leaves a 
 certain initiative and independence to the Church. It 
 does not confound the functions of Church and State, 
 or merge them in some Hegelian law of identity, which 
 is self-destructive to both. But then, on the other hand, 
 this theory of modified Erastianism, like all compro- 
 mises, does not work smoothly. The Erastian party 
 attacks it on one side, and the Ecclesiastical on the 
 other ; while the Evangelicals of this country, who, like 
 the Pietists of Germany, would be happy to accept 
 a compromise midway between Romanism and 
 Rationalism, find themselves squeezed out by both. 
 They are between the upper and nether millstone of 
 Cassarism and Clericalism, and, like all men who cling 
 to the past, they cry out feebly for help in all direc- 
 tions, and no help comes. They try to justify their 
 position and strengthen it by prosecuting offenders on 
 either side, and organise a " Prosecution Society, 
 Limited," as it has been described, to put down these 
 innovators. It is all in vain. The spirit of the age is 
 too much for them. The bolder spirits on either side 
 go in for theories, either of entire absorption of the 
 Church in the State, as Dean Stanley and the English 
 supporters of the Heidelberg school ; or of entire sepa- 
 ration, as the Ritualists. Others, again, seeing how 
 impossible it is to regulate conscience at all by Acts of 
 Uniformity, discard all attempts to do so, and openly 
 advocate a break-up of all traditional Churches and 
 organised systems. Between these conflicting claims 
 of an impossible past and a visionary future, the plain 
 man of sense, much puzzled, feels himself drifting on 
 to Disestablishment, but by a bit-by-bit process.
 
 2OO The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 Between abolition of Church-rates and Burial Bills 
 and University Reform Bills, the ascendancy of our 
 dominant Church is slowly melting away, like an ice- 
 berg floating down to the Gulf of Mexico. It may be 
 some time before the end comes, but it is only a question 
 of time, and the very attempts of the Church to defend 
 herself only hasten on her dissolution. Nothing can be 
 more fatal than the new-fangled claim to hold her 
 temporalities by an indefensible right as the Church of 
 Augustine and the Middle Ages. Held to this plea, 
 she has no right to say that the compromise which 
 Henry VIII. accepted and Elizabeth ratified is to be a 
 final settlement. They asserted the Royal supremacy, 
 but this carries everything ; and now that Royal supre- 
 macy means Parliamentary control, it is impossible to 
 say why some scheme of comprehension should not be 
 tried which should embrace the whole nation. In vain 
 does the Church party resist this. It lays itself, by its 
 timid attempts at compromise, open to the taunting 
 retort 
 
 " Come back, come back ! and wherefore and for what 
 To idly ringer some old Gordian knot ? 
 Too weak to sever, and too faint to cleave, 
 And idly clinging to some make-believe." 
 
 Nothing can exceed the feeble and hesitating tone of 
 the Episcopal Bench in our day. Calling for fresh 
 restrictions on lawlessness, or the dvopia, as they 
 pedantically describe it, they are unable, or afraid, 
 to say what is the meaning of this dvo/jua. From 
 the charges of the Bishop of London, whom we 
 may take as a typical mind of this spirit of compromise, 
 one would judge that the Ritualistic clergy desire law- 
 lessness (dvofj,ta) for its own sake. This kind of
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 201 
 
 reasoning is as absurd as that the dog went mad to 
 serve his private ends. It carries with it its own refu- 
 tation. The lawlessness on which the Bishop of 
 London waxes pathetic arises from a struggle for life of 
 two opposite theories of our mode of approach to 
 God, commonly known as the Protestant mode of justi- 
 fication by faith and of justification by the sacramental 
 system. Either of these theories may be true, or both 
 may be equally false ; or, as a third supposition, such as 
 the Broad Church school favours, both may be partial 
 truths, approximate expressions of a great and ineffable 
 mystery. But to charge with lawlessness the earnest 
 Catholic who wishes to expel the Protestant heresy of 
 salvation by faith alone, or, conversely, to complain of 
 Protestants such as the constituency of the Church 
 Association for retaliating in the same spirit, shows 
 singularly little knowledge either of history or of human 
 nature. It is the misfortune of bishops to be highly- 
 placed and salaried functionaries of a politico-ecclesias- 
 tical system unique in Church history. Since Byzan- 
 tinism there has been no such complete confusion 
 between the secular and the spiritual, or rather subjec- 
 tion of the spiritual to the secular, as in the English 
 prelacy. Elizabeth, on the whole, treated her bishops 
 as she did her Ministers of State. She used them as 
 instruments of statecraft, and then flung them aside 
 when useless. But James, with more cunning and less 
 force of character, discerned the use of the Episcopate 
 as a kind of breakwater to the rising tide of popular 
 liberty. It was James who accordingly gave that set to the 
 English Episcopate which it has never lost. As a rule 
 (for there have been honourable exceptions in all times),
 
 2O2 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 the Episcopate have been Conservative politicians first 
 and theologians, longo intervallo, afterwards. Hence it 
 is that their dread of change is instinctive. They are 
 set up and highly placed as flying buttresses of our 
 present social system, founded on feudal privileges 
 and class distinctions. The bishops as an order repre- 
 sent the past, and instinctively dread anything which 
 resembles change. Can it be wondered, then, that an 
 earnest assertion of spiritual convictions (be they right 
 or wrong is a question we do not here enter into) seems 
 to these conservators of the past as lawlessness ? This 
 was precisely the tone which they took at the preaching 
 of Wesley. To them, as to the town-clerk of Ephesus, 
 the question of the truth or falsehood of the doctrine 
 taught was quite secondary to the question, What are 
 its bearings on the present settlement in Church and 
 State ? Does it unsettle men's minds, and bring in new 
 views which tend to destroy the existing balance of the 
 Constitution ? then it is a lawlessness something not 
 customary and is to be discouraged by all the secret 
 pressure which a bishop can bring to bear on these 
 troublers in Israel. The very same complaints uttered in 
 our day by the Ritualists were uttered as loudly a gene- 
 ration ago by the Evangelicals against the insincerity 
 and double-mindedness of the bishops, saying one thing 
 in public and another in private. The charge is a true 
 one ; but the fault lay not so much with the men as 
 with the false position into which they have been put 
 a position so humiliating, that it is not easy to see 
 how a mind of force and originality can submit to it. 
 Before all things else, the bishops are the ecclesiastical 
 finials and ornaments of a feudal society. As such,
 
 The Church Defence Argument. 203 
 
 they are expected to frown down innovations which 
 might, if tolerated, make an end of the present settle- 
 ment of society. The bishops are never allowed to 
 forget that the purple, or Byzantine, livery as cour- 
 tiers is more to be regarded than the lawn of their 
 spiritual office. There is only one remedy for this most 
 mischievous confusion between the kingdoms of Christ 
 and of Caesar, and till it is applied we shall continue to 
 find bishops acting as they do. The fault lies in the 
 institution itself, not so much in the particular men 
 who administer it. As far as the bishops personally are 
 concerned, they are, as a rule, men of blameless lives 
 and high conscientiousness, but set to work a vicious 
 system, and unable, in consequence, to see their spiritual 
 functions in their true light. They have been so long 
 regarded as great officers of State, that, although their 
 functions in this respect are now purely honorary as 
 the offices of Lord Steward and Lord Chamberlain 
 they cannot get rid of that flavour of the past which 
 clings to them. Their very dress is archaic, without 
 being really ancient as if they held back just half a 
 century behind the rest of the world, without either going 
 back to what is really primitive, or going forward to what 
 is truly modern. This compromise with the past as to 
 dress is only too characteristic of the episcopal attitude 
 on all questions. They are unable to judge a theological 
 question on its own merits ; they must take its bearings 
 on the social and political system which they are there 
 to uphold. They never can forget that the Church, like 
 the milk-white hind, is always in danger. It is in 
 danger at one time from too much Protestantism, and 
 at another from too much Romanism ; but it is always
 
 204 The Church Defence Argument. 
 
 in danger, and, indeed, its only safety lies in nicely 
 poising itself between contending enemies. All these 
 hesitations would be at an end if the bishops ceased to 
 represent a social system, and were only set as watch- 
 men over a spiritual Zion. But this implies a drastic 
 remedy for an acknowledged evil, and " society " has too 
 many interests of its own in keeping up the institution 
 as it is on its present basis, to permit of the first step in 
 reform by an entire release of the bishops from all 
 attendance at Parliament. The House of Lords, with 
 a keen instinct, discerns that one change would call 
 for another, and the surrender of the life peerages of 
 the bishops might bring their hereditary peerages into 
 question. Thus it is that bit by bit Disestablishment, 
 however desirable, and in some respects preferable, is 
 not feasible. We must wait for some tidal wave of 
 public opinion which shall sweep away the whole insti- 
 tution as it is. When it falls, it will come down with a 
 crash in proportion to the obstinacy with which all 
 change has been resisted.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 THE CHURCH IN DANGER. 
 
 THE memory of man runneth not back to the time 
 when the cry of the Church in danger has not been 
 heard in some quarter or other. The milk-white hind 
 of Dryden's fancy was not hunted and hounded down 
 more fiercely by wild beasts, and still wilder men, than 
 is the Church of our day. The cry of the Church in 
 danger is supposed to summon to the rescue all who 
 call themselves Churchmen ; but the cry has been so 
 often raised that its defenders are left in doubt as to 
 the quarter whence the danger comes, and who are the 
 class who should fly to the rescue. At the cry of fire 
 at night we send for the brigade, at a cry of burglars 
 for the police ; but danger is such an indefinite term, 
 that unless we send for a posse comitatiis, and tell them 
 their duties when they come up, we shall be unable to 
 satisfy these alarmists on Church matters. As it is, we 
 may find men hastening with buckets and hose when a 
 pair of handcuffs are wanted, and bawling " Stop thief! " 
 when " All hands to the pumps " should be the order 
 passed round. 
 
 Before rushing to the rescue, then, let us pause and 
 ask ourselves two questions, which, after all, only amount 
 to one namely, What Church is in danger, and whence
 
 206 The Church in Danger. 
 
 does the danger come ? Is it an attack from with- 
 out, or is the danger one arising from disruption 
 within ? 
 
 Is the spiritual Church of Christ in danger ? The 
 answer to that is, that the only danger that it can meet 
 with arises from the fears of its too faithless members. 
 We do not say that there never have been fears for 
 the true spiritual Church of Christ, for as long as the 
 Church of Christ on earth contains such faint-hearted 
 men and women as we know she consists of, there will 
 be fears within as well as fightings without. But we 
 are bound to remember the answer of the stout old 
 sailor to a lady in a storm : " Madam, there is fear, but 
 no danger." Sometimes the reverse is the case, and 
 with a true sailor there may be danger, but no fear. But 
 with the inexperienced landsman it is far more often 
 that there is fear when there is no real danger. We do 
 not deny that there are fears for the spiritual Church of 
 Christ ; but this is when our consciences accuse us of 
 unfaithfulness then we tremble as Eli did for the ark 
 of God. But the true Church is, nevertheless, safe. 
 She is as far beyond the reach of attack as her glorified 
 Head. In the true sense of the word the Church is, 
 where the vast majority of its members already are, safe 
 beyond the flood, safe in the heavenly Jerusalem, with 
 the innumerable company of angels and the spirits of 
 just men made perfect. 
 
 Nor, again, is the Church which is in danger that 
 Episcopal Church whose doctrines are contained in the 
 Thirty-nine Articles, and whose discipline is Episcopal as 
 contrasted with Presbyterian discipline on the one hand, 
 and Congregational on the other. It is only the more
 
 The Church in Danger. 207 
 
 ignorant class of Church defenders who confound attacks 
 on the Establishment with hostility to the doctrines of 
 the Church, and who speak of all Dissenters as men 
 who have joined themselves, like Gebal, Ammon, and 
 Amalek of old, to hew down all the carved work of the 
 Temple with axes and hammers. The Church of Eng- 
 land, as a spiritual society, is in no danger of attack 
 from without ; but it is another matter when we speak 
 of attack from within. As a Protestant Episcopal 
 Church she is in serious peril from those who are 
 loudest in calling themselves Churchmen. The Anglo- 
 Catholic party make no concealment of their intention 
 of rooting out Protestantism ; it is to them the accursed 
 thing, and so deep is their hatred of it, that if they can 
 root it out in no other way than by attacking the 
 Establishment, they will not hesitate to do this. The 
 language of the Ritualist organs is so truculent and 
 threatening, that if they had the power as they have 
 the will, they would sweep away those reforms which 
 cut down the tall tree of sacerdotalism in the sixteenth 
 century, while it left its roots in the ground, though 
 with a band of iron and brass around it to prevent its 
 noxious growth. That band of iron is the civil supre- 
 macy which the Ecclesiastical party never can rid 
 themselves of but by entire disestablishment and dis- 
 endowment. They are not prepared for this, and since 
 liberty is only to be obtained by paying the price for it, 
 they remain as they are, and compromise with their con- 
 sciences by using coarse and violent language against 
 their ecclesiastical superiors. It has come to this pass 
 in the Church of England at present, that Caesarism and 
 Clericalism, or the two principles of civil supremacy or
 
 2O8 The Church in Danger. 
 
 of ecclesiastical, are now contending for the mastery. 
 Till the rise of the " Tracts for the Times " party, the 
 former principle was unquestioned by Churchmen. 
 Even the Laudian party and their successors, the Non- 
 Jurors, did not raise this point. The reason may have 
 been, that as the Royal supremacy was exerted on 
 their behalf, so they were supporters of the Royal 
 supremacy. The Ecclesiastical party in England was 
 also the Erastian party at least, during the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 This is one of the causes which explains the peculiar 
 hatred felt to Erastianism by the Puritan party. It was 
 bitter enough to have to fight an ecclesiastical battle 
 with Prelacy without being weighed down by a contest 
 with the civil power in addition. In our day, however, 
 the old alliance between Csesarism and Clericalism, which 
 has lasted on almost from the Reformation down to the 
 present, has been broken up. The Erastian and Eccle- 
 siastical parties in the Church of England, now com- 
 monly known as the Broad and the High Church, view 
 each other with suspicion and distrust. The leaders of 
 the two parties have not yet drawn the sword, and the 
 Bishops, as a rule, are trying to temporise and patch-up 
 a compromise. But any far-seeing man must feel that 
 the question which has divided the rest of Europe into 
 two camps must come up for settlement in this country. 
 The Cultus Kampf of Prussia is nothing less than the 
 old question of civil or ecclesiastical supremacy. The 
 jus circa sacra, allowed without dispute to temporal 
 princes, has now come up for settlement since the Pope 
 has ceased to be a temporal prince. Shrewd observers 
 remarked that the Pope's temporal power was, to a great
 
 The Church in Danger. 209 
 
 extent, a check to the exorbitant demands of his spiri- 
 tual supremacy. As one of the petty princes of Europe, 
 the Pope would never push a quarrel too far with his 
 brother kings. But now all is changed. The Pope has 
 no interest in accommodating matters with temporal 
 rulers ; his interests and theirs are now opposed. The 
 age of concordats is over. The old alliance between 
 the soldier and the priest has been broken up. That 
 this is a gain in the long run to the cause of popular 
 liberty is too obvious to call for remark. But, like all 
 cases of gain, it has its drawbacks. In every current 
 there is a backwater. So it is that one of the signs of 
 advancing liberty is the rise of the Ultramontane or 
 sacerdotal spirit everywhere in Europe. It breaks out, 
 too, in a similar form, and is evidently subject to the 
 same laws. One of its special characteristics is that it 
 is willing to ally itself with popular and even democratic 
 tendencies, in order to counteract the Erastian or Court 
 party. We see this in Germany, where the Ultramon- 
 tanes are also Particularists, and, in some cases, in 
 alliance with the social democrats. The same tendencies 
 are seen in Italy, and even in this country, where the 
 Ritualists are not seldom found in league with the 
 political Radicals and the supporters of the Liberation 
 Society. 
 
 There is no denying, then, that the cry of the Church 
 in danger is no longer a senseless one. In our day 
 there is danger as well as fear; but the public, if we may 
 judge by the tone of the press, deride their fears as if it 
 were the too-often repeated cry of "Wolf!" of the 
 boy in the fable. The Church has been so often in 
 danger at every act of concession of common liberty of
 
 2io The Church in Danger. 
 
 conscience, that it is no wonder that at last, when really 
 threatened as an Establishment, no one believes in the 
 danger. This is the fate which overtakes all Cassandras, 
 particularly those who are not wise enough to see the 
 Baconian axiom, that " a morose retention of old cus- 
 toms is the greatest source of innovation." The Church 
 party have uniformly resisted all relaxation of the laws 
 against Dissenters. They stood out against the Tolera- 
 tion Act, succeeded in defeating the Comprehensive 
 Bill, and then, to bar the door, enacted a Test Act 
 against Occasional Conformity. They were not content 
 even with this, but in Queen Anne's reign, under a Tory 
 Ministry, attempted to take back the toleration already 
 conceded, and tried to close Dissenting academies, and 
 to make it impossible for Dissenters to educate their 
 ministers. This foolish and wicked attempt at reaction 
 failed, as it deserved to do ; but it indicates what 
 Churchmen would have done if they had the power, as 
 they had the will, to legislate ; and it excited such a pro- 
 found distrust in clerical assemblies, that the sittings of 
 Convocation were suspended, and one of the avenues of 
 theological rancour thus effectually stopped up for a 
 century and a-half. The reassembling of Convocation 
 in our day is marked by the same spirit of intolerance 
 and inability to discern the signs of the times. The 
 Lower House is as unable as ever to make the smallest 
 concession on such a point as the Burials Bill, and thus 
 it is that the State Church lies in the trough of the sea 
 like a water-logged vessel : it can neither sink nor 
 swim. The Ecclesiastical party, if they had their way, 
 would save the ship by cutting it loose from State con- 
 nection, and launching it out on the open sea of Volun-
 
 The Church in Danger. 211 
 
 taryism as a highly-organised and sacerdotal sect. On 
 the other hand, the Erastian or Broad Church party 
 have a policy of comprehension which would save 
 the Church as a National Establishment, but at the 
 cost of its creeds and articles. But neither party can 
 expel the other, or take the command of the ship. A 
 creedless Establishment, like the National Churches of 
 Switzerland, or organised and exclusive sects as in 
 America, is the only programme of the future. The 
 inexorable logic of events elsewhere lays this alternative 
 before the English Churchman, and he is asked to take 
 his choice. But the average Englishman does not care 
 to be logical. He has an instinctive dread of carrying 
 out principles to their logical conclusions. He likes to 
 halt half way, and to take as much of two opposite 
 theories as will not violently contradict each other. 
 Thus he is in favour of an Established and dominant 
 Church, but he must allow full toleration to all who 
 dissent from it. In the same way, the bishops of our 
 day halt between the Erastians, who would save the 
 Establishment by sinking the Church, and the sacer- 
 dotal party, who would save the Church by sinking the 
 Establishment. As neither the High nor the Broad 
 School are strong enough to carry out their own policy, 
 the reigning theory in the Episcopal circles is that of a 
 High-Broad compromise. They are sound Churchmen 
 on the one hand ; on the other hand, they have enough 
 of the political instinct to know where they must give 
 way, as on the Burials Bill, and the result is that spec- 
 tacle of Episcopal helplessness, which is pitiable, if it 
 does not deserve a stronger epithet. Like a water- 
 logged vessel, the State Church of this country drifts 
 
 142
 
 212 The Church in Dangei. 
 
 helplessly along, with a disunited crew, and a prey to 
 the waves which are ready to engulf it. 
 
 There is no denying that this time it is no false alarm 
 that the Church is in danger. Formerly it was only the 
 outworks which were in danger. The admission of the 
 Roman Catholics, and then of the Jews, to Parliament, 
 the repeal of Corporation and Test Acts, the licensing 
 of Dissenting chapels for the celebration of marriages, 
 the abolition of Church-rates these were all regarded 
 as so many symptoms of the Church being in danger. 
 Men who enjoy a monopoly are shrewd enough to 
 suspect danger, and will sometimes raise the alarm 
 before they are attacked. Nor is this such a senseless 
 policy as it seems. It is not mere stupidity to appeal 
 to the fears and prejudices of mankind. On the con- 
 trary, knowing that the mass of mankind never can see 
 down to the bottom of a question, and live on certain 
 half truths which they call the wisdom of their fore- 
 fathers, it is not such a bad policy as it seems to appeal 
 to the fears of mankind. A State Church as a 
 "National Confession of God," or as a "bulwark 
 against Popery " these are the wise saws which pass 
 for philosophy among the masses. Even men who 
 make some pretension to think on political questions 
 do not see through the fallacy of this kind of reasoning. 
 With the masses, therefore, the axiom that a State 
 Church must be upheld at all cost passes current as an 
 unquestioned truth. The old cry, the Church is in 
 danger, does not suggest, as it ought to do, the thought 
 that an institution so frail, and which needs so much 
 protection and patronage, cannot have much root in 
 itself. The true theory that the Church has been weak
 
 The Church in Danger. 213 
 
 because leaning on an arm of flesh, and will be strong 
 in proportion as she casts off the State or is cast off by 
 it, is not reached all at once. Still, in the long run, 
 mankind does reach the true view of the matter. The 
 singular fact that the Church gathers strength exactly 
 in proportion as she discards endowment and establish- 
 ment and throws herself on the Voluntary principle, 
 begins to impress even the unthinking. The mass of 
 Churchmen are now in a midway position on this ques- 
 tion. They do not discard the old theory, they do not 
 deny the new. They simply halt between the two. 
 They are like a garrison shut up in a citadel of privi- 
 lege, and ready to summon or surrender. But they will 
 not haul down their flag without a struggle. Nothing 
 shows so much the abandonment of the old ground as 
 the statement made by Church defenders that they do 
 not dread disestablishment so much for the Church's 
 sake as on account of the State. The Church is Divine, 
 and can cast herself on her Divine Master ; but the poor 
 State this is what distresses them. The argument, if 
 it means anything, amounts to this that the Church 
 can do very well without the State, but the State cannot 
 do without the Church ; and, when looked into, amounts 
 to that half Manichaean conception of the world's 
 government which religious people can seldom quite 
 get rid of. All that is Divine and spiritual in man is 
 enshrined in the Church ; outside this Goshen all is 
 dark. We need not turn aside to expose the fallacy of 
 this kind of reasoning. Its fundamental error is in 
 assuming the very point in question : that God has tied 
 Himself up to one order and institution of men. It 
 amounts to the old dogma, extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
 
 214 TJie Church in Danger. 
 
 It is the Augustinian theory of the Divine government 
 in its harshest, narrowest, and most external sense. 
 Men must break the shell of this type of dogmatism, 
 and see for themselves that it is God who has made us, 
 and not we ourselves, and that Church and State alike 
 are only instruments, partial and imperfect at best, for 
 the education of the world. Until they see this, we 
 shall find them clinging to fallacies such as we have 
 noticed above, and raising endless alarms that the 
 Church is in danger, because one prop after another of 
 political support is taken away. 
 
 For Church defenders of this class we have only one 
 wish, which is that their worst fears may be soon verified. 
 They may learn the same mystery with regard to the 
 Church, the mystical body of Christ, which each believer 
 has to learn in his own experience ; the flesh must be 
 destroyed, that the spirit may be saved in the day of 
 the Lord Jesus. It is in the break-up of all outward 
 and visible Churches, by their disruption from within as 
 well as their disestablishment from without, that the 
 true spiritual Church, the bride of Christ and the hope 
 of the world's future, will be discovered. This twofold 
 process of disruption and dissolution, from internal 
 schisms, from external attacks, does not distress or dis- 
 appoint us. On the contrary, it leads us to see the 
 hastening of Christ's kingdom and coming. It is a 
 mistake to suppose that this law of dissolution is 
 arrested as soon as we have reached the stage of separa- 
 tion of Church and State. There is no magic in dis- 
 establishment to arrest the law of change, as if the Free 
 Church led a charmed life, exempt from the ordinary 
 changes of life which affect alike all human societies,
 
 The Church in Danger. 215 
 
 religious as well as secular. It is this idol of uniformity 
 and fixity which clings, yea, even to the regenerate 
 this delusion that if one external type of religion will 
 not resist decay, another may be found which will. 
 This error greatly weakens the testimony of those who 
 oppose State Churches, but show in every act of their 
 Church life that they are stamping on Plato's pride with 
 greater, and who oppose Establishments of one kind 
 by setting up an Establishment of their own. Hence 
 it is that Church defenders retort on Dissenters that 
 they do not attack the Establishment with clean hands, 
 and that their motive is no better than that of the fox in 
 the fable who lost his tail. It is more candid to admit 
 that all endowment is a quasi Establishment of religion, 
 and that between the religio licita and the religio civilis 
 there are but thin partitions. Creeds and confessions, 
 trust deeds, colleges, and bursaries these are the props 
 which our popular Dissent made for itself last century. 
 When Dissent has fully organised itself in this way, and 
 donned a coat of mail of Saul's armour, it finds itself 
 unable to go out against the giant of unbelief. The 
 very students who were trained in the academies of 
 Doddridge and Watts fell away in many cases into 
 infidelity. Some stayed at the half-way house of Uni- 
 tarianism, and of the few Abdiel-like spirits faithful 
 among the faithless found, there was seldom any mark 
 of originality or of spiritual power at first hand. They 
 were feeble copyists and imitators of the Puritans of a 
 more heroic age. The difference between the Church- 
 men and Dissenters of last century was well summed 
 up by the late Mr. Jay, that the Church was asleep in 
 the dark, and Dissent asleep in the light. Of the
 
 216 The Church in Danger. 
 
 two, we should agree with Mr. Jay in adding that the 
 sleep of the Church was the more excusable. 
 
 We have no right, then, to criticise and condemn 
 endowed and established Churches unless we are pre- 
 pared to cut up by the roots the principles which 
 inevitably lead on to endowment in the first stage, 
 and establishment in the second. If we object to 
 "organised Christianity," in toto, we shall be said to 
 be "unpractical," to entertain chimerical schemes of 
 regenerating the world without using the right means. 
 This text will be brought against us, " How shall they 
 hear without a preacher, and how shall they preach 
 except they be sent ? " Now, we must clear ourselves 
 from this charge, as if we regarded organisation as 
 an evil, and not as a good. We would use organisa- 
 tion in religion, but only as means to an end. As the 
 organisation of a plant stamen, calyx, pistil, and so 
 forth is only to nurse the pollen which, when shed and 
 scattered like dust on the earth, or winging its flight 
 through the viewless air, is carrying on its mission, and 
 continuing the life of the plant in new and endless 
 forms ; so it is with our Church organisations they 
 have their use, but it is a subordinate one. They are 
 for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the 
 ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we 
 all come to the perfect man. The flower is for the 
 fruit, and a plant that flowers only and does not go on 
 to bear fruit is only half a plant. Its beauty is only an 
 abortive birth ; it has exhausted itself in the earlier 
 stages of its being ; it does not bring forth that which 
 is fruit or enjoyment, in the strict sense of the word 
 fruit. Much of our Church organisation is of this kind,
 
 The Church in Danger. 217 
 
 and because it is so the testimony of the free Churches 
 against established is so weak and wavering. 
 
 Still God fulfils Himself in many ways. The old 
 order changeth, yielding place to new, lest one good 
 custom should corrupt the world. Our very " century of 
 sects," which men in Milton's day bewailed, and which 
 we have to put up with and make the best of even 
 this has its good. The Presbyterian and Methodist 
 Churches both attempted, through organisation, to 
 defy the law of change ; but have they fared better than 
 those Churches, as the Baptist and Independent, which 
 set up no central authority, but let churches and con- 
 gregations take their own course, and make their own 
 way to land ? The " other little boats," as they have 
 been compassionately called, of unorganised Dissent 
 have fared no worse than the stately ships of endowed 
 and established Churches. The lesson is this, that 
 all organisation is only provisional, and when that 
 which is perfect is come that which is in part shall 
 be done away. The less organised Churches have, more- 
 over, this advantage, that they can more easily reform 
 and slough off the incrustation of ages. The charge 
 of old Robinson, of Leyden, to the Pilgrim Fathers 
 to see that God has more light yet to break out of His 
 Word, was a thought beyond his age, and, to some ex- 
 tent, even beyond ours. In an age when toleration was 
 thought a sin, and the crudest conceptions of the rela- 
 tion of the Old Testament to the New were held on 
 all sides, it must have been regarded as little else than 
 a heresy that God had more light to break out than the 
 doctors of Lambeth and Dort could teach. Organisation
 
 218 The Church in Danger. 
 
 is the sworn foe of discovery in all departments ; it 
 is the same in our colleges of science as in our halls 
 of divinity ; and this being so, the best Church must be 
 the one with the fewest traditions of the past, and the 
 lightest and most elastic constitution to adapt it to the 
 wants of the future. 
 
 In spiritual things, moreover, order and form, how- 
 ever convenient, tend to repress the Divine life as much 
 as to encourage it. It cannot be denied that the be- 
 ginnings of the Divine life are often attended with 
 extravagances, and that the spirit of the prophets 
 should be subject to the prophets. It is right to en- 
 force this truth, that God is the God of order, and not of 
 confusion ; but order and organisation are the second, 
 not the first. Life is before order, and essence before 
 form. Churches, then, have to make their choice. 
 Where there is much form there is a low type of 
 spiritual life. It is crushed ; or, if it breaks out at all, 
 it is among mystics and ascetics, as we find during the 
 Middle Ages. On the other hand, where order is re- 
 garded as quite a secondary thing, and the growth of 
 the body in love and holiness regarded as the chief 
 thing, there a high type of spirituality is found com- 
 bined with a simple and unascetic type of everyday life. 
 We venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that the 
 class commonly known as Evangelical Nonconformists 
 do, on the whole, exhibit more faithfully than other 
 endowed and established Churches what the Church was 
 intended to be. There is a tendency to formalism, no 
 doubt, there, as everywhere. Still the same petrifying 
 influences are not at work in their case, or, at least, to
 
 Tlie CJmrcJi in Danger. 219 
 
 the same extent. The exercise of free prayer is, in itself, 
 a witness for the presence of the Abiding Comforter. 
 Forms of prayer witness to a Holy Ghost in the past ; 
 and in so far as the Church is historical, we consider it 
 mere prejudice to object in toto to forms of prayer, as 
 some Christians do. But free prayer is a witness that 
 the Holy Ghost is present among us ; and whoever 
 would oppose this, may be said to " quench the Spirit, 
 and to despise prophesyings." Since edification is the 
 great end of the Church, whatever edifies most is the 
 best and most reasonable form of service. Now, fixed 
 forms, especially if repeated very frequently, do certainly 
 deaden life. On that subject there can be no question, 
 and the best evidence to it is the craving for variety, 
 which takes in our day the diseased form of Ritualism. 
 But this scenic religion, with its new properties, dresses, 
 and decorations, soon wearies us, as a play would, and 
 the spirit is sated, but not satisfied. The remedy we 
 cannot describe ; for to be understood it must be 
 experienced. It consists, in a word, in fresh discoveries 
 of Christ in His Word, and fresh applications of this 
 to our daily needs. This will raise the tone of our own 
 spiritual life, and we shall desire in our Church fellow- 
 ships to join with those who thus worship God in spirit 
 and in truth. A Church which is growing in this way 
 will not lay much stress on forms or ceremonies, black 
 gowns or white. The Ritualistic controversy which is 
 vexing the heart of our Evangelical friends of the 
 Establishment will sound to it like the roar of some 
 distant sea to one who is inland, far and sheltered deep 
 from storms. The member of a free and spiritual 
 society of this kind may be said to be like King
 
 22O The Church in Danger. 
 
 Arthur, when the whole Round Table is dissolved and 
 borne away 
 
 " To the island valley of Avilion, 
 Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly but it lies 
 Deep meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns 
 And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea, 
 Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." 
 
 To our friends, then, of the Church Defence party, 
 who tell us that the Church is in danger, we reply that 
 we are glad it is so. It is possible nay, probable 
 that dissolution of the State tie may lead to other 
 changes, and this will seem the prelude to a decay as 
 bitter as death itself. But out of that very decay there 
 will spring a new and a better life, in which the Church 
 will act in the world as leaven in the lump, and the 
 Kingdom of God will come, not with observation, but by 
 slow growth from within, as the grain of mustard seed, 
 in which the greatest springs from the least.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 REFORM, NOT REVOLUTION. 
 
 SINCE " Reform, not Revolution," is the plea of many 
 excellent Christians, we are bound to show reasons 
 why Reform is impossible, and that Revolution is the 
 only remedy. On this subject we shall do well to 
 attend to the distinctions of the old ceremonial law. 
 There were two degrees of leprosy, whether in houses, 
 in garments, or on persons ; the one was malignant 
 and contagious, the other not. Hence it was that for 
 the former there was no remedy but the taking down of 
 the house stone by stone. Let us apply this to the 
 case of the English Church. Built up as she is since 
 the Reformation on the foundations of royal supre- 
 macy, and with evils like prelacy, patronage, purchase, 
 and, above all, the sacerdotal theory of an exclusive 
 clerical order, worked into the very fabric itself, can we 
 conceive of any way of reforming these evils short of 
 entire revolution ? If any one says that the Church will 
 be the same Church after she is disendowed and dis- 
 established, and when purged of prelacy and lay 
 patronage and its attendant evil, the purchase system, 
 we shall not care to dispute about names with those 
 who cling to the word Church. Their reform amounts 
 to our revolution. It is not improbable that a decided
 
 222 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 majority of Dissenters would conform to a Prayer- 
 book purged of its sacramentalism, and to an Episcopacy 
 reduced from its present status as a prelatical order to 
 a kind of primus inter pares status among Presbyters. 
 Whether the Church in England will ever be reformed 
 in such wise as the Free Church in Ireland has been, 
 may be doubted. In all probability the disestablished 
 English Church would break into two, or perhaps three, 
 hostile and rival sects. The Ecclesiastical and the 
 Evangelical parties certainly would not hold together. 
 It is probable that the Latitude party would also form 
 a sect by themselves. They would probably offer them- 
 selves to the State on its own terms, to do the work of 
 a moral police, and act as custodians of our national 
 monuments, the cathedrals and abbeys of England; 
 and the State might accept them, and endow them as a 
 kind of Society of Antiquaries or College of Heralds, 
 with a sort of secularised hierarchy like the Freemasons 
 or the Royal Academicians. The Church of the future 
 may, and probably will, drift into combinations of this 
 kind ; but to assert that either of these three fragments 
 of the existing State Church could claim by any law of 
 continuity to represent the existing State Church of our 
 day, is more than we can in candour admit. When so 
 thorough-going a remedy as Disestablishment is applied 
 to an institution which is nothing if it is not a State 
 Church, it is idle to call it a reform, and not a revolu- 
 tion. The Reformation revolutionised the Anglican 
 Church of the Norman and Plantagenet period of our 
 history. It converted it from a Pope's Church into a 
 Crown Church, and as the supremacy was the key to 
 the struggle, the flag around which the battle raged,
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 223 
 
 when that fell the struggle was] over. An old Church 
 and order passed away, and " God, who fulfils Himself 
 in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the 
 world," allowed the old order to change, yielding place 
 to new. The Anglican contends that it was only a 
 reform, not a revolution. Be it so. What we desire in 
 that case is another reform as thorough of its kind. 
 We desire that same supremacy which was taken from 
 the Pope and given to the Crown, to be now taken from 
 the Crown and given to the people. Instead of the 
 pseudo-Congregationalism of our new district churches, 
 with their pew-rents and other imitations of the volun- 
 tary system, we should like to see Congregationalism, 
 pure and simple, to become the rule of religion in this 
 country. Nothing is gained by our underhand imita- 
 tion of Congregationalism ; like all imitations, it is 
 the basest kind of flattery, and recoils on those 
 who resort to it. At present we have the evils 
 without the compensating advantages of Congre- 
 gationalism. We bring in the power of the purse 
 and other evils of plutocracy inseparable from the 
 voluntary system, without its hearty recognition of 
 the great truth that every congregation of believers is a 
 Church of the living God, having fraternal relations to 
 all other Churches, but supreme as to its internal affairs 
 and administration. This may be an apostolic theory 
 of church government (we think it is, but do not here 
 discuss this), but it is at least logical and self-consistent; 
 whereas that imitation of Congregationalism, known as 
 the voluntary principle, in the English State Church is 
 neither one thing nor the other. Repudiated by both, it 
 is dying of sterility. It is unable to reproduce itself,
 
 224 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 and its chief champions, the old Evangelical party of 
 the Church of England, can only raise the helpless cry 
 of " Reform, not Revolution." What they would like, if 
 we may judge by writers like Canon Ryle, is a combi- 
 nation of opposites as monstrous as a flying fish or a 
 boat on wheels. They want a pure Protestant and 
 Evangelical Church, holding all Reformation doctrine 
 or fiction of theology known as the truths on which 
 "Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer were agreed." This, 
 which is the platform of the Bible and the Tract 
 Societies, and the Evangelical Alliance, may be a true 
 draft of apostolic doctrine or not ; but it is clear to the 
 plainest understanding that it unchurches one-half of 
 Christendom, and leaves out in the cold, as infidels or 
 worse, large remnants of the rest All Roman Catholics, 
 Unitarians, and even orthodox High Churchmen of the 
 old type, are outside this narrow pale of the " Bible, the 
 religion of Protestants." A growing minority, even 
 among those who hold it, have given up the position that 
 the Bible is an infallible book, and this disposes of the 
 platform itself on which Evangelicals attempt to raise 
 the frail superstructure of a National Church. A 
 National Church for the Episcopalian subscribers to 
 the Bible and Tract Societies we have only to state it 
 in this way to show that the bed is shorter than a 
 man can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower 
 than that he can wrap himself in it. 
 
 The basis of a National Church of this kind is so 
 narrow that it is worth examining into the reasons why 
 men who are voluntaries in practice can cling to a 
 theory of State Churches so utterly out of harmony 
 with the age. These theories are twofold.
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 225 
 
 I. It is said that there ought to be a national confes- 
 sion of God. 
 
 II. It is said that we need a bulwark against the 
 Church of Rome. 
 
 I. With regard to the argument that a State ought to 
 have some national acknowledgment of God, the reply 
 is to admit the major, but deny the minor, of the fol- 
 lowing syllogism : 
 
 " The State is bound to acknowledge God ; 
 To acknowledge God it must establish some religious order ; 
 Therefore, &c., &c." 
 
 The fallacy turns on the equivocal sense of the term 
 " acknowledging God." Even under the Old Testament 
 the prophets rebuked the people for preferring the 
 ceremonial to the moral element in religion. The well- 
 known passage Micah vi. 6 is only one of several, all of 
 which teach the same truth. Granted, even, that it is the 
 duty of the State to recognise God, there are many 
 stages between that admission and the conclusion that 
 it is desirable to set up some national cult, with an 
 order of men set apart for the exclusive duty of con- 
 ducting that cult. It has been often urged that the 
 universality of this idea of a national cult is an argu- 
 ment in its favour, for what is quod semper, quod ubique, 
 and quod ab omnibus, must have in it the stamp of a 
 national law or necessity of human nature. But the 
 induction is too general, and does not meet the ex- 
 ceptions. True that all Oriental societies are theocratic, 
 and that they fall to pieces as soon as the power of the 
 priesthood is undermined. We see this in the civilisa- 
 tions both of Egypt and India. They owe their early 
 growth and premature decline to the same causes. 
 
 IS
 
 226 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 They leaned on the power of a priesthood, and with the 
 decline of that priesthood they faded away. Granted, 
 also, that to some extent sacerdotal ideas and the special 
 sanctity of a priestly caste underlay the civilisation of 
 Greece and Rome ; this would prove nothing more 
 than that a national cult was the fittest expression of 
 homage to a deity who was local, and who was sup- 
 posed to be the tutelary patron of the State. As we 
 see in modern saint worship, which is the exactest re- 
 production of the old-world Paganism, a local deity had 
 a local shrine. It was the oracle of Delphi, the oaks of 
 Dodona, the Venus of Paphos, the Artemis of Ephesus, 
 the Jupiter of Ammon, and a hundred other places. 
 The gods of the conquered places were deported with 
 the inhabitants; the fugitive carried with him his house- 
 hold gods where he went. At this stage of thought a 
 national cult suits a people. Society would not have 
 existed at all if it had not externalised religion, and 
 inwoven it in this way into the very fabric of society. 
 But we remark that as ideas of a "world-order" advanced, 
 and with it there came clearer conceptions of the ruler of 
 this Cosmos in other words, as men approached to 
 Monotheism, so conceptions of a national cult, and a 
 priestly caste to uphold it, fell into the background. 
 In Judaism, more than anywhere else, we may see this ad- 
 vance marked. When the chosen race were in the rudest 
 stage of all, slaves just escaped from Egypt, and with 
 ideas of Magianism and priestcraft still clinging to 
 them, the I AM was revealed to them as a tutelary Deity, 
 going before them in a pillar of fire by night, and of 
 cloud by day, dwelling between the cherubim, and 
 veiled from sight by the thick curtains of the sanctuary.
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 227 
 
 In this case one tribe was set apart to exercise the 
 priestly office, and a minute and painful ritual of sacri- 
 fice and ceremony marked that the God of Israel was 
 as yet not fully known to His people as the Lord of the 
 whole earth. With a local priesthood and a local sanc- 
 tuary a national cult was, we admit, quite in harmony. 
 But even in Judaism we see marks of growth and 
 advance. The preparations for the Monotheism of the 
 future were already made. An order of prophets was 
 raised up, if not professedly to supersede the priests, at 
 least to limit their functions, and reduce their supre- 
 macy. It has been remarked by the late Mr. Mill, very 
 justly, that one of the safeguards of liberty in Israel 
 was this order of prophets. It was owing to the 
 prophets that Israel was preserved from sinking into a 
 caste system of religion, as in Egypt and the East 
 generally, and was prepared to become the herald of a 
 higher civilisation and religion in the future. The 
 transformation in Israel from a State-Church to a 
 Church-State, in which the centre of gravity is shifted 
 from the spiritual to the secular side of society, is 
 marked, though gradual. At first the administration 
 was hieratic, as much as in Egypt. The ruler of Israel 
 was a priest-king, or Cohen, as in all the surrounding 
 tribes. Then came the Shophet, or irregular military 
 chief, assisted by an irregular and spasmodic burst of 
 prophetism in the Roeh or Seer. Lastly, there came 
 the Melek, or secular ruler, with a Nabi, or religious 
 teacher, as his assessor ; and as there was a succession in 
 the kingship, so there were sons of the prophets. 
 Under this latter administration the priesthood sank as 
 much into the background as it did in the later times 
 
 152
 
 228 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 of Greece and Rome. Just as the King-Archon in 
 Athens was the mere survival of an earlier theocratic 
 stage of society, and so with the titular rank of Pontifex 
 Maximus in Rome, in the same way in Israel the 
 priesthood of later times was but the shrunk image 
 and shadow of the earlier institution. As Ewald points 
 out, the latest stage of the theocracy was a hierocracy, 
 in which scribes and doctors of the law were the leaders 
 of Israel, after prophet, priest, and king had almost, if 
 not quite, disappeared. Rabbinism was the last and 
 iron age of Israel. It was now nearing its decay. 
 The things which were decaying and waxing old were 
 ready to vanish away, and Israel, having fulfilled its 
 predestined work as the preparation for the Gospel 
 of Peace, passed away in a good old age, having 
 outlived all the other civilisations of the East and 
 West. The explanation of its very longevity lay in 
 this, that it never surrendered its liberties to a priestly 
 caste. There was always a balance of forces, something 
 like what we should call in modern phrase a Constitu- 
 tional system, in Israel. The first messenger of God, 
 as Moses, who is said to have seen God face to face, 
 was brother to the first priest, Aaron, who was or- 
 dained for God in things pertaining to men. When 
 this apostle and high priest in one passed away with 
 the lifetime of the two brothers, the leadership fell to a 
 military chief and one of the sacred caste. So it con- 
 tinued under the Judges, and when the military leader- 
 ship was fixed in one family, and the tribe of Judah 
 became preponderant, the balance was restored by an 
 order of prophets, raised up from time to time, and 
 taken indifferently from all the tribes.
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 229 
 
 We argue, then, that,'so far from the history of Israel, 
 rightly interpreted, sanctioning the principle of a national 
 cult and a priestly order of men to conduct it, it teaches 
 the very opposite. Priestism was an accommodation on 
 God's part to the local ideas of Deity scarcely raised 
 above polytheism in which Israel was found in Egypt ; 
 but all the education of Israel was upward from this 
 elementary stage. In their maturity, so far from pro- 
 fessing a national cult, theirs was the very opposite. It 
 was a Church-State a kingdom of priests. Rabbinism 
 has its faults, but they are not those of a priesthood. 
 
 The argument, then, that the past tells invariably in 
 favour of a national recognition of religion is not worth 
 much. It breaks down in the favourite instance. 
 Unless we are such children in Biblical criticism as the 
 divines of the Jacobean age, who gravely argued the 
 question of a Levitical order presided over by a Scotch 
 Solomon, we had better argue the question on its own 
 merits, and not on dangerous precedents of this kind, 
 which recoil on those who use them. Arguing, then, the 
 question on its merits, we ask, Is the modern State bound 
 to maintain a national worship ? Do we recognise God 
 in this way ? It is childish to say that we could not 
 acknowledge God publicly without an Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury to act as our high priest or Pontifex Maximus. 
 So far from this, the United States officially acknowledge 
 God through a proclamation of the President, and it is 
 on this very account that the act comes from a secular 
 source, and does not flow through any ecclesiastical 
 channel that it is obeyed so much more cheerfully 
 by the people. In this country, we are as afraid 
 to bring out the old creaking machinery of a Queen's
 
 230 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 letter to the Archbishop as if it were the Corona- 
 tion coach. Were a proclamation issued, and the de- 
 tails left to each sect and communion to observe the 
 fast or thanksgiving in its own time and way, this 
 would be abreast of the facts of the age. But to enforce 
 attempts at uniformity after the principle of religious 
 uniformity has become obsolete, is to ensure failure ; and 
 this is why, even as regards external recognition of 
 God's moral government, we, with our State Church, are 
 more lax than the United States without such an insti- 
 tution. It is a paradox, but a truth, that we, with an 
 organisation kept up for this very object, do not attain 
 the end in view so well as the United States with no 
 organisation whatever. What should we say, if, with a 
 standing army and 'a costly navy, we were more unpre- 
 pared for war than if we kept up nothing more than a 
 militia and a merchant marine ? But so it is with re- 
 gard to a national cult Our priesthood, maintained at 
 much cost for this, if for nothing else, fails on this very 
 occasion, when, according to religious people whose pre- 
 judices we respect though may not agree with, we are 
 bound as a nation to recognise God. 
 
 II. The second plea for a National Church is, that it 
 is a bulwark against Rome. Considering that in our 
 day the only Romeward tendencies are seen among the 
 clergy of the National Church, it is difficult to state it 
 seriously. We are reminded of Cicero's remark, that 
 one augur could not look another in the face without 
 laughing. Where is the Evangelical Churchman so 
 simple as to believe that the bulwark theory is anything 
 else than the cry of a few fossilised politicians, who 
 think that the downfall of the British Constitution dates
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 231 
 
 from the day of Catholic Emancipation ? The men of 
 that school are not consistent with their own sentiments. 
 If, as a nation, we then committed apostacy if it might 
 then be said, "Take away her battlements, for they are 
 not the Lord's," why are they ready to mount the breach 
 again and die in the last ditch, as they say of themselves, 
 in defence of one outwork after another of the old sys-. 
 tern of ascendancy ? The same men who cried Ichabod 
 over Catholic Emancipation were unwearied in denounc- 
 ing the grant to Maynooth, as if the latter were not the 
 logical and necessary sequel of the other. In the same 
 way, they opposed the admission of the Jews to Parlia- 
 ment on account of its unchristianising the Legisla- 
 ture. Yet they seemed to forget that it had already 
 been unchristianised, in their sense of the word, by 
 removing the last of the Roman Catholic disabilities. 
 In Mr. Lyle's " History of Eton College " we come upon 
 one of these political fossils who sincerely believed in the 
 bulwark theory. Plumptre was in his day the genial, 
 humorous, generous, eccentric, and orthodox tutor and 
 fellow of Eton. Popery, we are told, was his great 
 bugbear. On the night that Catholic Emancipation was 
 carried, he is said to have paced the cloisters all night 
 with Mr. Briggs, a fellow of the College like-minded with 
 himself, and he more than once declared, in after years, 
 that the measure which he then had so deprecated was 
 "the wickedest thing since the Crucifixion." The late 
 Bishop of Exeter was not only the last of that school of 
 intolerant Orange Tories of the Georgian era, but he 
 also, in his career as a renegade from political Pro- 
 testantism to the side of the reaction Romewards, 
 shows how little this bulwark theory is to be trusted
 
 232 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 even by those who stand behind it. The same Dr. 
 Philpotts who wrote fierce no-Popery pamphlets, and 
 threw himself into the breach with Eldon and Sir 
 Charles Wetherall against any, the smallest, concession 
 of political rights to the Roman Catholics, adopted, in 
 his old age, Church principles identical in essence with 
 . those of the Church of Rome. Nor let us be too hasty 
 to condemn him as a turncoat. It was no transforma- 
 tion, but simply an evolution from one religion of 
 authority to another. As a political Churchman, he had 
 set up the Royal arms as supporters of the Bible and 
 Crown. The Protestant religion, as by law established, 
 had been his watchword, and when, as the result of 
 Catholic Emancipation and the returning wave of 
 Liberalism after the July revolution of 1830, the Royal 
 support were seen to fail, he and others of his school began 
 to look out for a fresh support for the tottering Church 
 Establishment. They sought it in Church principles, 
 and where they sought for it they found it. Dr. New- 
 man, in his " Apologia," tells us the origin and rise of 
 the " Tracts for the Times." They sprang out of the 
 alarm and revolt of Oxford Toryism at the revolutionary 
 measures which the Melbourne Ministry brought into 
 Parliament the threat of disestablishment in Ireland 
 and the actual suppression of ten bishoprics in that 
 country. It was out of this panic of political Churchmen 
 that there sprang up the new school of Anglicans, who 
 held that it was sacrilegious to touch the Episcopal 
 office ; bishops were the successors of the apostles, and 
 consequently to strike a blow at them was to aim at the 
 very heart of the Church, or, at least, at its historical 
 continuity in this country. It is true that the Anglicans
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 233 
 
 of our day have moved on, and left far behind the 
 principles and professions of the earlier writers of the 
 " Tracts for the Times." The Ritualist of our day who, 
 in politics, is usually a Liberal, and more often indif- 
 ferent, if not actually hostile, to Establishments, is as 
 unlike as possible to the first generation of Tractarians, 
 who, if they have any antecedents, may be said to be 
 the direct descendants of the Non-jurors. The transfor- 
 mation from Orange Toryism to Anglicanism, and from 
 that to Ritualism, is so great that, as a party, they may 
 be said to have boxed the political compass. They are 
 now as distinctly in favour of Roman Catholic claims 
 as their fathers were opposed to them. A Protestant 
 State Church is as much their abhorrence as it was the 
 idol of the men who fiercely resisted Catholic Emanci- 
 pation, and then, in disgust at the concession, threw 
 themselves into the arms of a reaction which was, in all 
 but the name, identical with modern Ultramontanism. 
 The history of Churches is instructive on this subject, 
 and should be a warning as to the dangerous and de- 
 ceptive nature of all alliances of Church and State. 
 As long as the State favours one Church and gives her 
 an exclusive political status, we may count on her 
 exuberant loyalty, and she will teach a doctrine of 
 passive obedience, which is slavery thinly disguised. 
 But let not the State reckon blindly on her loyalty 
 when her own privileges are touched, or she may find 
 the favoured Church break out, Absalom-like, into an 
 unnatural rebellion against her too-indulgent lord. 
 James II. had some reason to complain of the bad faith 
 of the English Church, or rather of its Court divines, 
 who had been preaching all their lives a slavish doc-
 
 234 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 trine of submission to the tyranny of a Nero, and then 
 betrayed him on the first occasion, when James did an ap- 
 parently liberal thing and granted indulgence. In all pro- 
 bability, we should never have had the Revolution of 1688, 
 if James II. had not been so infatuated as to attempt to 
 force an ill-timed concession of toleration on an age not 
 ripe for it. The people were alarmed for the cause of 
 Protestantism, but the Church was much more alarmed 
 for her ascendancy ; and it was owing to this accidental 
 and temporary alliance of Church and Dissent that we 
 owe the Revolution. When the tale of bricks was 
 doubled, then Moses appeared, as the Jewish saying 
 runs. In the same way, when the good things of Oxford 
 and the prizes of the Church were in danger, then the 
 Church threw to the winds its doctrine of passive 
 obedience. Church history is full of warnings of this 
 kind. If it is dangerous for the Church to lean on the 
 State for support, it is to the full as dangerous for the 
 State to lean on the Church. Reversing the motto of 
 " United, we stand ; divided, we fall," we should say of 
 Church and State that their union is weakness, and their 
 separation strength. When united, the Church infects 
 the State with the besetting fault of Churchmen 
 their desire to call in carnal weapons in a spiritual 
 warfare. We see that in the case of Laud. On the 
 other hand, the State gives a tone of secularity to the 
 Church, and the result of the mixture of secular and 
 spiritual is, as always must be the case, not to make the 
 secular spiritual, but to make the spiritual secular. 
 
 It only excites a smile to hear the antiquated cry of 
 1827 revived in our day, that a Protestant Establish- 
 ment is a bulwark against Popery, If there are any
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 235 
 
 survivors of the school of Spooner and Inglis and the 
 founders of the National Club, they must feel ashamed of 
 the weak and childish treble into which the "big, manly 
 voice " of fifty years ago has shrunk. The cry, though a 
 bigoted one, was not unmeaning then. Such as it was, 
 the Establishment, fifty years ago, was decidedly Pro- 
 testant It was Erastian and worldly, no doubt, in its 
 tone ; but its faults, such as they were, did not lie in the 
 direction of a reaction Romewards. Dr. Newman's 
 testimony on that point is decisive. Referring to the 
 rise of the " Tracts for the Times," he observes, in his 
 " Apologia " * : " The great Reform agitation was 
 going on around me as I wrote. The Whigs had come 
 into power. Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set 
 their house in order, and some of the Prelates had been 
 insulted and threatened in the streets of London. The 
 vital question was, How we were to keep the Church 
 from being Liberalised ? There was such apathy on the 
 subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others ; 
 the true principles of Churchmanship seemed so radi- 
 cally decayed ; and there was such distraction in the 
 councils of the clergy. Blomfield, the Bishop of London 
 of the day an active and open-hearted man had been 
 for years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the 
 Church by the introduction of members of the Evan- 
 gelical body into places of influence and trust. He had 
 deeply offended men who agreed in opinion with myself 
 by an off-hand saying (as it was reported), to the effect 
 that belief in the Apostolical Succession had gone out 
 with the Non-jurors. ' We can count you,' he said to 
 some of the gravest and most venerated persons of the 
 
 * Vide "Apologia," p. 30. Second Edition.
 
 236 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 old school. And the Evangelical party itself, with its 
 late successes, seemed to have lost that simplicity and 
 unworldliness which I admired so much in Milner and 
 Scott. It was not that I did not venerate such men as 
 Ryder, the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others of similar 
 sentiments who were not yet promoted out of the ranks 
 of the clergy ; but I thought little of the Evangelicals 
 as a class. I thought that they played into the hands 
 of the Liberals. With the Establishment thus divided 
 and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I 
 compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was 
 reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal 
 on behalf of that Primaeval Mystery to which I had so 
 great a devotion from my youth, I recognised the move- 
 ment of my spiritual mother, Incessu patuit Dea." 
 
 It is impossible to read this passage so pathetic in 
 its tender grace, so transparent in its truthful delinea- 
 tion of the state of parties in the English Church then and 
 since without feeling that a silent revolution has passed 
 over that Church since the day when, as Newman himself 
 tells us, he was taught the doctrine of the Apostolical 
 Succession by the Rev. William James, then a Fellow 
 of Oriel, in the course of a walk round Christ Church 
 meadow. " I recollect," he adds, " being somewhat im- 
 patient of the subject at the time." There was some mean- 
 ing in the expression that the Church of England was a 
 bulwark against Rome forty years ago ; there is none 
 now. For better or worse we do not discuss that point 
 here the spread of Church principles has rounded off 
 the angles and smoothed down the differences between 
 the Reformed Church of this country and the unre- 
 formed Church of Rome. If, in one sense, the Rome-
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 237 
 
 ward tendency has been stayed in our day, it is because 
 men are not so sensitive as they were forty years ago to 
 the enormous differences between the Churches which 
 accepted and those which withstood the Reformation. 
 The abyss has been, in a measure, bridged over. In- 
 stead of a rampart against Rome, the Anglican Church 
 has become a kind of drawbridge, across which the 
 garrison may pass the fosse, and hold safe parley with 
 the enemy in the gate. It is not the language of " No 
 Popery " panic-mongers, but the serious remonstrance 
 of the entire Episcopal Bench, with only two excep- 
 tions, that the danger cannot be concealed, and that 
 there is an open conspiracy within the English Church 
 to efface the Reformation. It is in vain to say that 
 being a conspiracy, it is obviously the work of a con- 
 temptible minority for which the great mass of the 
 English clergy are not to be held responsible. But the 
 answer to this is, that minorities have a strange fashion 
 of becoming majorities. Unless a movement of this 
 kind is quickly put down, it gathers strength by indul- 
 gence, and, having made good its position within the 
 Church, it succeeds, like the camel in the Eastern story, in 
 ejecting the man from the tent. First the nose, then 
 the neck, and finally the hump is thrust under the tent- 
 door ; and then, instead of the demand for toleration, 
 the claim is set up that they are there, not by sufferance 
 at all, but by right. Any one who will compare the 
 balance of forces between the Anglican and the Evan- 
 gelical parties, will see that the centre of gravity in the 
 English Church has been silently, but steadily, shifting 
 during the last twenty or thirty years. The secession of 
 Dr. Newman marked the turning-point. Up to about
 
 238 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 1845 we should say that the bulwark theory, though a 
 little antiquated, was not quite obsolete. Now it is 
 so completely out of date, that it raises a question 
 whether senility is not carried to the point of doting 
 insipience when some of the old Evangelical party tell 
 us that, but for the State Church, we should have no 
 bulwark against the encroachments of the Church of 
 Rome. Mr. Ryle told us the other day, in language 
 more homely than elegant, that the Church of Rome 
 would come and " make mincemeat of Dissenters," if 
 their best and only defence were removed. We do not 
 know if Dissenters are reserved, like Ulysses, for the 
 distinction of being eaten last by this Polyphemus of 
 Rome ; but this we are certain of, that, but for the 
 sacerdotal party in the English Church, there would be 
 no Polyphemus' den in this country at all. Rome is wise 
 in her generation, and she knows this, and openly 
 avows her intention to use the State Church as a 
 stepping-stone to her old position of ascendancy. She 
 is opposed to disestablishment or to any policy which 
 would drive matters to extremities in this country. 
 Her motto is, Festina lente. She would keep up the 
 so-called barrier, using it all the while as a drawbridge. 
 It will be time enough to drop the mask when the work 
 of assimilation between new and old Catholics in this 
 country has gone on, and when, almost without a sense 
 of jar or a breach of continuity, the old cathedrals are 
 restored to their former uses. 
 
 Let us not, then, be misled by phrases or use old 
 watchwords after the meaning has long since died out 
 of them. A State Church never was a real battlement 
 of defence against the Church of Rome. The oracle
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 239 
 
 advised Athens to pull down her stone walls and trust 
 to wooden the meaning of which was obvious. It was 
 to be beforehand with the enemy, and to meet him by 
 sea, and not allow him to land and invest the city of 
 the violet crown. In the same way, we should urge on 
 all who believe in Protestantism to trust in no defences 
 foreign to the genius of a religion of liberty and free 
 inquiry. It is doubtful if National Churches were 
 much defence to the truth in the days of Luther and 
 Calvin ; but, at all events, they were not then violently 
 out of harmony with the age as they are now. There 
 were garrison Churches then, like that of Geneva, in 
 which the magistrate and the minister of religion, be- 
 tween them, kept the city ; and the result was a kind of 
 theocracy foreign to the genius of the New Testament, 
 and which soon broke down, as all attempts to gal- 
 vanise the past invariably must. In our day, the 
 garrison theory of State Churches as the bulwarks of 
 Protestantism has signally failed. One such garrison 
 Church has been removed in Ireland, to the general 
 satisfaction of all but a prejudiced minority, who, with 
 all their loud claims to be Protestant, show, by their in- 
 tolerant manner, how little they understand of the real 
 genius of the system of which they make so loud a pro- 
 fession. True Protestantism is nothing unless it is a 
 spiritual system, using no other weapon than the sword 
 of the Spirit, which is the Word of God ; appealing to 
 no other standard than the enlightened conscience ; and 
 claiming no authority beyond the willing submission of 
 its own professed followers. Such a religion as this, so 
 far from asking help from the State, finds itself weak 
 and unable to go up to battle only when it is clad in
 
 240 Reform, not Revolution. 
 
 this Saul's armour of establishment and endowment. 
 I am aware of the special pleading by which the edge 
 is taken off these remarks. First, we are asked, Do we 
 object on principle to all or any form of endowment ? 
 If not, it is added, What can be the harm of securing 
 this endowment under State control ? and so it is in 
 this way that order or organisation leads the way to 
 endowment, and then in its turn endowment to estab- 
 lishment. This is the old sophism of the hairs in the 
 horse-tail ; or, in popular language, give an inch and 
 take an ell. It is the fallacy of the Sorites applied to the 
 question of the connection of Church and State. It is 
 better to meet it at once by setting up such a pattern of 
 a Church in which Congregationalism and the voluntary 
 principle go hand in hand, and where there is no room 
 for establishment because no desire for endowment. It is 
 easier to guard against the evil in the future, than to say 
 how to deal with it in the past. In this respect 
 the remark of Macchiavelli is full of point, that maladies 
 are at first difficult to trace out, but easy to apply the 
 remedy to ; whereas, after they have become inveterate, 
 it is conversely easy to see the evil, but difficult to apply 
 the remedy. This is the case with the English Church 
 at present, and our only hope is that the nature of the 
 evil will suggest the remedy, and that, seeing the bul- 
 wark of Protestantism has become a drawbridge to 
 Rome, men may learn to distrust State Churches, and 
 leave truth unarmoured to fight its own battles, when it 
 will certainly be more than a match for error. 
 
 We have thus disposed of the two excuses of those 
 who argue that we should reform the State Church and 
 not abolish it. They tell us that a State Church is a
 
 Reform, not Revolution. 241 
 
 national recognition of God, and also that it is a bulwark 
 against Rome. We reply by an appeal to facts. Do 
 we recognise God so much by endowing a certain clerical 
 corporation as by national acts of righteousness, mercy, 
 and truth ? Again, What is the worth of a bulwark 
 when it actually invites the attack of the enemy, 
 and is rather a defence to traitors within than from the 
 besieging army without ? A theory which is thus tested 
 by facts, and so signally breaks down, cannot be worth 
 much, and, indeed, it remains what it always was, a 
 mere theory an excuse for conserving an institution 
 when it has outlived its time. Reasons, according to 
 that arch-sophist, Father Newman, are not so much to 
 find out what is true, as to find arguments for maintain- 
 ing what we know to be true already from other sources. 
 Reasoning of this kind, which is preposterous in the strict 
 sense of the word, is more resorted to in theology than 
 in any other department of thought. In exact science 
 it would be scouted at once ; but the vicious method of 
 authority has so infected theology that men are scarcely 
 aware that they are arguing not to, but from, a foregone 
 conclusion. On this account it is that the practical 
 statesman has to stop and scatter a little dust on the 
 theological hornets, and compose the strife in this way. 
 Some day or other, the Church will be disestablished in 
 this country, and those who spun these cobwebs of proof 
 as to the duty of the State and the defence of a 
 National Church to our popular Protestantism, will learn 
 the force of the homely saying, that an ounce of mother- 
 wit is worth a pound of clergy.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 THE CONSERVATIVE ARGUMENT. 
 
 " SUPPOSE the Church never to have been united to the 
 State, where is the Christian who would not exclaim 
 against the idea of the union were it now proposed ? " 
 This remark of Vinet points to the real difficulty of the 
 problem of Disestablishment. Strange as it may seem, 
 a State-Church, or a Church-State, are alike so foreign 
 to the genius of primitive Christianity, that, finding 
 both types in existence, men begin to argue that this 
 after-growth of primitive times must be a normal pro- 
 duction, as the parasite plant is of the oak. Let us 
 regard it with the same superstitious reverence as the 
 Druids did the mistletoe. Let us say of it in the Latin 
 saw, Fieri non debet, factum valet. No one would think 
 of setting up a State Church in this country ; but no 
 one, on the other hand, regarding the difficulties attend- 
 ing Disestablishment, would now think of pulling it 
 down. This is the sententious commonplace which 
 passes for political wisdom among the governing classes 
 , in this country. It is almost as luminous as the 
 Hegelian law of identity, that whatever is, is. But the 
 opinion passes current in too many circles not to en- 
 gage our attention. In fact, it is the very philosophy 
 which suits a rich and self-indulgent age, too absorbed
 
 The Conservative Argument. 243 
 
 in the pursuit of riches and the worship of art to care 
 much for first principles. The argument, if it is worth 
 anything, amounts to this, that we are mere trustees of 
 the past, and not entitled to deal with our own national 
 institutions. We are bound, in fact, to administer them 
 as we find them. We are ready to admit that it is the 
 part of the wise man to make the best he can of 
 existing circumstances, to like what he has when he 
 cannot have what he likes. None of our institutions, 
 whether civil or military, are so perfect in theory that 
 we should carry them on as they are if we could begin 
 de novo. But the case in point is a very different one. It 
 is an admission that a State Church is an obsolete insti- 
 tution, which, nevertheless, must be carried on because 
 it is too troublesome to disturb the trust, and because 
 questions of property are so mixed up with it, that to 
 raise the one would disturb the settled character of the 
 other. The fieri non debet argument amounts to this 
 either that the State has lost its power to control the 
 Church, or that we have not a single statesman able to 
 grapple with a question of such magnitude. In fact, an 
 argument of this kind, which gives up the principle of 
 an Establishment, and rests the case on the mere vis 
 inertia of a majority of Conformists, is a most danger- 
 ous support for such an institution as the Church of 
 England. In a letter written some few years ago to 
 Mr. G. Mitchel, Mr. Gladstone stated his present stand- 
 point with regard to the English State Church to be 
 this : " In my opinion, the Establishment of England, 
 but not of Scotland, represents the religion of a con- 
 siderable majority of the people, and that they do not 
 seem to desire the change that you recommend. This 
 
 16 2
 
 244 The Conservative Argument. 
 
 being so, the only other question I need now ask myself 
 is, whether the civil endowments and status of the 
 Church are unfavourable to the effective maintenance 
 and propagation of the Christian faith. If and when I 
 am convinced that they are so, I shall adopt your con- 
 clusion, but not before." Mr. Gladstone, in this pas- 
 sage, rests the case of the Establishment on the support 
 of a majority not yet brought round to the other side, 
 with the ominous qualification, which may at any time 
 turn the scale in the other direction, that at present the 
 civil endowments and status of the Church are not un- 
 favourable to the effective maintenance and propagation 
 of the Christian faith. It is a complete surrender of all 
 principle in the matter, and a direct challenge to the 
 minority who have a conviction against State Churches 
 to begin a crusade to convince the majority who are 
 confessedly apathetic. If England were polled by man- 
 hood suffrage on this question, probably the immense 
 majority would be found to be indifferent to the claims 
 alike of Church and Dissent, although at present this 
 neutral mass is claimed as belonging to the Church. 
 Obviously, then, the will of majorities is a dangerous 
 support on which to rest a State Church. It is remark- 
 able, too, with what ease majorities are brought round 
 to the side of the minority. It is almost as easy to dis- 
 pose of them as for a few disciplined men to disperse 
 a mere rabble. As soon as we descend from principle 
 and argue on theyfcn' non debet principle, we quickly get 
 on to sayfactum non valet. To men who have gone as 
 far as this, the rest of the journey on to Disestablishment 
 is not far to traverse. We have only to point out, in 
 order to complete our case, that the abuses outweigh the
 
 T/te Conservative Argument. 24$ 
 
 advantages, and, further, that these abuses are insepa- 
 rable from a State Church, whereas the advantages are 
 those which any orderly and organised type of free 
 Christianity would secure. Englishmen are never weary 
 of proclaiming themselves to be a practical race. It is 
 their boast that, however averse from abstract and 
 a priori speculation, they are well able to deal with any 
 question on its merits. Disembodied ideas are not to 
 their taste ; but when they take shape and touch terra 
 firma, no one grasps their meaning more readily, or deals 
 with them more determinedly, than the Englishman. 
 With regard to such abstract questions as these viz., 
 whether it is the duty of the State to maintain an 
 Establishment of religion or not he is somewhat hazy. 
 He looks upon these discussions as only suitable for a 
 debating society. He leaves it to young men to debate 
 in a discussion forum on the abstract merits of the best 
 possible government in Church and State. What do we 
 mean by our duty ? what are we to understand by the 
 State ? is religion a mere external cult, or is it an inward 
 conviction ? these are a few of the pitfalls which lie in 
 the way of those who settle these points by reference 
 solely to first principles. On this account the average 
 Englishman is not far wrong in refusing to discuss the 
 question of Establishments on a priori grounds. We 
 should be prepared, then, to take the controversy up at 
 the point where the practical Englishman becomes in- 
 terested in it. We are going to judge the Establishment 
 by its practical results. Franklin was in the habit of 
 setting down the pros and the cons to any particular 
 course of conduct like a debtor-and-creditor account in 
 a ledger, and then to cast up the sum of the reasons for
 
 246 The Conservative Argument. 
 
 or against it. Others have done the same, and the 
 diaries of religious people fifty years ago were made up, 
 in a great measure, with cases of conscience calculated 
 by these rules of mental arithmetic. The practical 
 working of an institution is the way in which it will be 
 judged by the great majority of men. Whatever is best 
 administered is best ; in this way they settle all ques- 
 tions of abstract statesmanship. In a constitution like 
 ours, any part of the machine which does not work well, 
 and contribute to the general welfare of the whole, is 
 taken out and repaired. If, after it is put in again, it is 
 still found to be no source of strength but the reverse, it 
 is then put aside as a useless encumbrance. Not only 
 do the judges hold their office quamdiu se bene gesserint, 
 but also the judiciary itself would be reconstituted if its 
 inefficiency as a whole became an ascertained fact. The 
 House of Lords, for instance, as an Hereditary Chamber, 
 does not contribute anything like its proportionate 
 strength to the constitutional machine. As a compen- 
 sation-balance to the preponderance of the Lower 
 House, it is not up to its work ; and though the majo- 
 rity of Conservatives are too shortsighted to see it, there 
 would be the truest Conservatism in doing something to 
 strengthen the House of Lords. "Whether the addition 
 of a large representative element in the shape of a life 
 peerage would meet the necessities of the case, we need 
 not here discuss. One thing is certain, that the consti- 
 tution, like a piece of watchwork, will not put up with 
 wheels which do not cog truly, or ratchets and pins which 
 are not in gear. The antiquarian watchmaker may 
 treat as a survival some piece of the machine which has 
 been superseded by modern mechanism, and may make
 
 Tlie Conservative Argument. 247 
 
 believe that he has put it in. But survivals which are 
 left in only for appearance' sake, like the buttons behind 
 a dress-coat, will not be kept up if they interfere with 
 some useful reform. The House of Lords has, to some 
 extent, answered this purpose in the past, and to a cer- 
 tain extent does so still. It is the drag-chain on the 
 constitutional coach ; but any improvement of that coach, 
 by which the wheels could lock themselves at a touch 
 of the driver, would at once supersede this drag-chain. 
 This being so, it becomes the interest of all who would 
 keep up that continuity between the past and the pre- 
 sent which is the boast of the British Constitution, to 
 relax no effort in order to bring every part of the ma- 
 chine of State into full working order, and to reform or 
 remove it. Utility is not the final test of truth ; but ours 
 is a world where few at best are far-sighted, and the 
 struggle for existence is so keen that the majority must 
 live from hand to mouth, morally as well as materially, 
 with a few snatches of truth and philosophy provided 
 for them in a proverbial form. Our statesmanship can- 
 not go beyond, then, the " greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number " principle. If any constitution answers 
 this test of utility, we shall not inquire into its reason- 
 ableness. The eternal fitness of things will not trouble 
 us if it fits us with things as they are. We are fain to 
 fall back on the Latin saw, Fieri non debet, for which, in 
 the light of pure reason, we must express our un- 
 measured contempt. Factum valet will hold good of 
 any institution which works fairly well, and is not out of 
 gear with the rest of modern society. Church Estab- 
 lishments will stand or fall in our day on utilitarian 
 grounds of this kind. If, on the whole, the majority
 
 248 T/ie Conservative Argument. 
 
 approve of them, and approve for the reasons which 
 apparently satisfy Mr. Gladstone that, on the whole, the 
 Establishment is not unfavourable to the effective main- 
 tenance and propagation of the Christian faith there 
 will be little use in appealing to abstract principles. 
 
 The sentiment of Free Churchmen is a noble one, and 
 might be written in letters of gold on a temple of truth. 
 " We believe in the vitality of Christian truth, in the 
 power of Christian character, and in the infinite energies 
 of Christian love. If these cannot overtake the religious 
 necessities of a country, no law will ever be able to 
 accomplish it." But this grand sentiment, like Ar- 
 chimedes' lever, would move the world if we could only 
 find a fulcrum. The Free Churchman has found a moral 
 fulcrum in the phrase, " I believe in the vitality of Chris- 
 tian truth." Of course, if we can rise to this altitude, and 
 see, as Milton did, that truth has in it an inherent vitality 
 and power when matched single-handed against error, 
 the question is then at an end. Our lever has moved 
 the world. But the majority do not believe in pure 
 truth when unbacked by power or authority of some 
 kind. The majority must have truth, if not diluted, at 
 least worked up in some palatable shape. It must be 
 truth labelled as such, and packed in the sealed wrapper 
 of some recognised Church. This being so, we are 
 bound to meet men on their own ground, and to help 
 them to judge of the cause by its effects. We must 
 show them Establishments as they operate among 
 ourselves and in our day. It will not be enough to point 
 out that State Churches worked disadvantageously else- 
 where in Europe, or formerly among ourselves. It will still 
 be said that this is nothing to the point, Have they not
 
 The Conservative Argument. 249 
 
 reformed, and is not the State Church of our day more 
 in harmony with the spirit of the age than it ever has 
 been before ? There is no denying this fact. So much 
 is this the case, that Churchmen now triumphantly point 
 to the fact, and challenge us to show the abuses which 
 still remain unreformed. A case against Establish- 
 ments would fail which relied on the corruptions of the 
 Georgian era the nepotism, worldliness, and unblush- 
 ing avarice of bishops like those of George II.'s reign, 
 which made that not very exemplary monarch observe, 
 that he thought all his bishops were atheists. The 
 answer to this is, that these were not so much the faults 
 of the Church as of the age, and that " Other times, 
 other manners " is a proverb as true in English as in 
 French. We will admit the justice of this remark, and 
 give the Church the benefit of the difference between the 
 Georgian and the Victorian era. But, taking the Church 
 as she exists in our day, we think that a case may be 
 made out to show that all her increased activity is not 
 on account of her State connection, but in spite of it. 
 It is precisely in proportion as her status and privileges 
 as an Establishment are threatened and challenged that 
 she puts forth efforts to make good her claim to be the 
 Church of the nation. We must have read history to 
 very little purpose not to see that an institution often 
 reforms on the very eve of its destruction. It is swept 
 away at the moment when it is in the act of removing 
 those abuses which cried loudly for reform. So it was 
 with the old French monarchy. It fell not under the 
 gilded hypocrisy of the Grand Monarque's reign, or the 
 swinish sensuality of a Louis XV., but in the reign of 
 the virtuous, amiable Louis XVI. who, but for the fact
 
 250 The Conservative Argument. 
 
 that he was the heir of the crimes as well as the glories 
 of his ancestors, might have gone down into history as 
 the benevolent locksmith, as our George III. is remem- 
 bered as Farmer George. Louis was of the two the 
 better man, but how different his fate ; and all this be- 
 cause monarchy in France attempted reform exactly a 
 century too late. If the French, like the English, Revolu- 
 tion had occurred in 1689 instead of in 1789, its course 
 might have been different. This is the reply, then, to 
 those who argue that the Church may be saved as an 
 Establishment through the devotion and public spirit of 
 large numbers of its dignitaries in our day. The argu- 
 ment from their activity tells with fatal effect the other 
 way. It is the result, not of State connection, but the 
 Voluntary principle, which has led to the large expendi- 
 ture of upwards of twenty-six millions on the Church 
 and cathedrals since the year 1840 an amount, pro- 
 bably, twenty times as much as was spent during the 
 century previous, before the breath of Voluntaryism had 
 begun to stir the stagnant depths of the State Church. 
 
 Reasoning, then, on the method of concomitance, we 
 argue that the activity of the Church varies inversely, 
 not directly, with the amount of State support and 
 patronage. The union is not like that of mind and 
 body, in which the health of the mind varies directly 
 with the soundness of the bodily organs, especially the 
 brain. The law of concomitance shows us, in the case 
 of the connection of Church and State, a result so in- 
 variable that we may almost describe it by the following 
 formula : The more the Church is subsidised and 
 supported by the State, the more her nat've energies 
 languish. On the other hand, the more she is deprived of
 
 The Conservative Argument. 251 
 
 these external supports, the more she takes wing and 
 soars, as a partridge does when the setter has fairly 
 beaten her out of cover. It is not surprising that the 
 Erastian press, which desires to keep religion under State 
 control, should make use of Lord Hampton's returns to 
 prove that so powerful and energetic a body as the 
 Church is now seen to be must not be treated as a mere 
 sect. But for earnest Churchmen to accept that kind of 
 argument implies a very dim conception of where their 
 real strength lies. Much, it is true, of this twenty-six 
 millions was given by wealthy men who wished, in a 
 monumental fashion, to commemorate themselves by 
 building churches and setting up windows of stained 
 glass in them. But still enough remains of genuine 
 zeal to justify the statement, that the Church can work 
 on the Voluntary system almost as energetically as any 
 sect. If so, the inference is obvious that if she has done 
 so much under State control, how much more might she 
 do if set free. This return of Lord Hampton is a two- 
 edged sword, and cuts the hand of those who wield it 
 in favour of continuing the Church as she is as well as 
 of those who say that her spiritual strength has de- 
 parted. 
 
 We are willing to admit that the Church has remedied 
 many abuses, and is in the fair way of purging herself 
 from others. She is thus, as a State Church, entitled to 
 appeal to the cut bono argument, and plead, as Mr. Ryle 
 does, " Whit good will it do ? " The retort is obvious, 
 " What harm will it do ? " If it will do Dissenters no 
 good to disestablish the Church, may we not add it will 
 also do th'* Church itself no harm to be disestablished ? 
 On this utilitarian level as much can be said on one side
 
 252 TJie Conservative Argument. 
 
 as on the other ; and since we are arguing at present on 
 these grounds, we may as well go on to show what are 
 our reasons for thinking that the Church can be re- 
 formed in only one way. The inference is a fair one, 
 that if the Bishops have done so much since they were 
 warned by Lord Melbourne, now nearly fifty years ago, to 
 set their house in order, they will continue to do more 
 when released from a burdensome position. At present 
 they are State officials, lodged in so-called palaces, and 
 expected to keep up the state and hospitality of a 
 country nobleman with an income which, measured by 
 that of a peer of our day, is only genteel poverty. The 
 Bishops, as spiritual peers, are in a thoroughly false 
 position, and, to do them justice, they feel it. The official 
 dress which the lay peers insist on the lords spiritual 
 putting on when they take part in their debates is in- 
 tended as a silent hint that they are there, more or less, 
 on sufferance. It is a small but significant hint, that, 
 like the chaplain at a nobleman's table, they are below 
 the salt, and intended to retire after grace and when the 
 real business of debate begins. If the Bishops, as a 
 rule, were not raised from the class of college tutors and 
 Greek-play-editing schoolmasters, they would resent 
 this offensive rule of the lay peers, who dispense in every- 
 day use with robes for themselves, but only allow the 
 judges to sit in ermine and the bishops in lawn the 
 former without a vote at all, and the latter with only a 
 consultative vote. The Bishops, in fact, are treated by 
 the lay peers as buffers between themselves and public 
 opinion. The peers are aware that, before reform can 
 touch their order, it must first sweep away the Bishops ; 
 and, impressed with this danger, they rather tolerate the
 
 The Conservative Argument. 253 
 
 existence of Bishops as barons in Parliament for the sake 
 of offering a sort of breakwater against the wave of 
 reform which must one day rise against a Chamber of 
 hereditary legislators like our existing House of Lords. 
 
 The argument, then, is conclusive that the Church is 
 strong or weak in an inverse ratio to its connection with 
 the State. But it is said we are carrying our theory 
 too far in insisting that, if the Church grows strong 
 exactly in proportion as it is cast off by the State, that 
 this will continue after the separation between the two 
 is complete. Does not the argument prove too much ? 
 Is it not like the argument for abstinence ? A man has 
 weakened his constitution by excess ; he becomes tem- 
 perate, and exactly in proportion as he abstains does he 
 recover his vigour. Let him go on, then, cutting down 
 one article of diet after another, and will it not be like 
 the man who brought his horse down to live on a straw 
 a day ? only, unfortunately for the success of the ex- 
 periment, the horse died too soon for the theory to be 
 verified. State support, in the same way, may enfeeble 
 the Church's vigour ; but, take it away altogether, and 
 may she not fall away into a rabble of sects, and at last 
 disappear altogether ? 
 
 There is no saying what may not happen in the case 
 of a Church so completely Erastianised as the English 
 Church is. She may have lost all recuperative power, all 
 faith in her Divine mission, and in the truth that " One 
 is her Master, even Christ." In that case, she must in- 
 fallibly perish. But, then, that is because she has long 
 since become a dead branch of the living vine, and is 
 only fit to be burned. But we are willing to believe 
 better things of her than this. The zeal and activity
 
 254 TJu Conservative Argument. 
 
 put forth on the Voluntary principle, not by one section 
 of the Church, but by all, show that she has not lost all 
 her inherent vitality. She is, like Milton's lion, " part 
 pawing to be free." Every effort which she puts forth 
 to recover lost ground, and resume her position as the 
 National Church, succeeds in one direction and fails in 
 another. It succeeds in giving her an honourable posi- 
 tion as a competitor with the Free Churches, but it fails 
 in giving her the ascendancy she once had, and which 
 she still sighs after. Judging by present appearances, 
 we should say that, if there were no other forces at work 
 to disestablish the Church, such as the attacks of Non- 
 conformists without or the divisions of High and Low 
 Church within her, the activity which she is now putting 
 forth on the Voluntary principle would rack her to pieces 
 as a State Church in a few years. She is calling, for 
 instance, for more Bishops, and even providing for their 
 endowment by the benefactions of her own members. 
 The State cannot refuse to sanction this effort, but it 
 is unable to meet these benefactions by the smallest 
 assistance even out of ecclesiastical funds ; much less is 
 it prepared to make these new Bishops peers in Parlia- 
 ment. Thus at once a distinction is created between a 
 class of Bishops who are prelates and another class who 
 are not, and the result is, that, since the Church cannot 
 level up, she will not be long in levelling down. In 
 many other ways, this contrast between the Voluntary 
 and the State-controlled action of the Church will be- 
 come more marked every day. Already the missionary 
 branch of the Church has broken loose from its fetters, 
 and Bishops in foreign parts are consecrated, and the 
 Church, in all its efficiency as a reproductive body,
 
 The Conservative Argument. 255 
 
 planted out without waiting for a Queen's letter. The 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, it is true, is still tied by the 
 Royal Supremacy, but the Colonial Bishops are not, so 
 that the way is prepared for a complete emancipation of 
 the Church from State control as far as her missionary 
 work is concerned. 
 
 We are justified, then, in arguing that the maximum 
 of internal activity is only reached when there is the mini- 
 mum of State interference. We may even go one step 
 further and say that when the last link of State connection 
 is broken, the Church will take a new lease of life. Be this 
 as it may, we are bound to carry on the work of disen- 
 tangling our civil and ecclesiastical relations from the 
 knot in which they were twisted during the Middle Ages. 
 We are sure that it is for the good of the State to do so, 
 and we believe that it will be equally for the good of the 
 Church, although for the present those who are interested 
 in the connection do not see it. We have thus pointed 
 out those evils of the Church which are inseparable 
 from State connection, and which she can never purge 
 herself from except by Disestablishment. We have 
 endeavoured to prove that the evils largely outweigh the 
 advantages. We shall now, in conclusion, set down the 
 reasons on both sides, and casting them up in the way 
 that Franklin made us familiar with, come to a settle- 
 ment which the most utilitarian mind will admit is based 
 on a strict appeal to facts.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 CONCLUSION AND RECAPITULATION. 
 
 OUR inquiry has thus reached the point where we are 
 entitled to draw a conclusion. We have seen that all 
 Church order and organisation tend to stiffen into for- 
 mality ; and that, having begun in the spirit, men seek, 
 like the Galatians of old, to be made perfect by the 
 flesh. This is the master-key to all the corruptions of 
 later years. There are many departures from the truth, 
 but they have all this character in common, that they set 
 up something between Christ and the conscience, some 
 substitute for living communion with Him who is the 
 Fountain of Life. The earliest form of this corruption is 
 Clericalism, or the lording it over God's heritage on the 
 part of ecclesiastical rulers, and its later and final form 
 is Csesarism, the outcome and consequent of the former, 
 when the civil power lords it over God's heritage. The 
 one leads on to the other, and they alternately check and 
 control each other. We have also seen that the Refor- 
 mation at best very partially broke this heavy yoke. In 
 most cases the Churches only exchanged one form of 
 oppression for another. The so-called national type of 
 Church has only this to be said in its excuse, that it 
 transferred the supremacy from a foreign to a home 
 tyrant. No inconsiderable advance, we admit, con-
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 257 
 
 sidering that the worst native tyrant is a better head of 
 the Church than the best foreigner ; as Byron expresses 
 this thought with regard to Miltiades, tyrant of the 
 Chersonese 
 
 " A tyrant, but our masters then 
 Were still at least our countrymen." 
 
 Still it was at best only an exchange of masters. It 
 was a step in the direction of true reform ; but unless 
 we are able to go on and complete the emancipation of 
 the Church, we are preparing the way for a reaction 
 Romewards. 
 
 Turning to the history of the Church of England, we 
 see these anticipations exactly verified. We see an 
 organised hierarchical Church constituted in the estate 
 of Prelacy in Saxon times, and losing its local liberties 
 and national independence at last in its subjection to 
 the centralising despotism of the Papacy. This Papal- 
 Caesarism lasted some three or four centuries, from the 
 time of the Norman kings till the Act of Supremacy of 
 Henry VIII. Then came a change of masters, and 
 instead of a Pope-Caesar there was a Caesar-Pope. This 
 is the Establishment of the Tudor and Stuart kings, 
 which we have to deal with to-day, and the problem is, 
 How can we complete the Reformation of the future? A 
 National Church, as we have seen, can only continue on 
 these terms, that it becomes as comprehensive as the 
 nation itself. Now, since the nation is hopelessly 
 divided on all questions concerning the unseen world 
 and the hereafter in general, a Church which is to em- 
 brace the nation in one form of cult must abolish 
 dogma, abandon creeds, and dissolve into a form of 
 Deism, resting on an ethical basis only. There are a 
 
 17
 
 258 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 few extreme Erastians and Broad Churchmen who are 
 prepared to support a National Church on such terms 
 as these ; but to do the majority of earnest Christians 
 justice, they would prefer entire Disestablishment and 
 total Disendowment to such a compromise of principle 
 as this. They must have a definite creed, if not a rigid 
 and inelastic type of ritual. They would never consent 
 to retain a National Church on the only terms on which 
 it can exist in a free and Parliamentary-governed 
 country like ours. 
 
 This being so, and the conditions of definiteness and 
 comprehension being irreconcilable, there is no future 
 for a National Church in this or any other country. It 
 is only a question of time when the majority, who are 
 unwilling to face the fact that they are shut in to a 
 logical dilemma, shall begin to look at the question in 
 its true light. They will then either decide for a 
 National Church without dogma like the so-called 
 National Churches of Switzerland, which are little else 
 than schools of unbelief or they will decide for a dog- 
 matic Church which, from the nature of the case, must 
 cease to be National. We have shut our eyes long 
 enough to this inevitable dilemma ; and if we continue 
 to do so much longer, we may have to march between 
 Caudine Forks of a disgraceful surrender to both 
 extremes at once. To save the Church's National 
 character, we may surrender dogma ; and then to save 
 her dogma, when it is too late we may part with its 
 status as an Establishment. In trying to save both, we 
 may commit the folly of losing both, and this is what 
 is already resulting from the unnatural alliance of the 
 Erastian and the Ecclesiastical parties, for which the 
 Bishops are chiefly responsible.
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 259 
 
 As wise men we are bound, then, to face this question, 
 and adapt the existing machinery of the Church to the 
 wants of the age. At present we have a vast accumula- 
 tion of old endowments, the growth of ages ; Bishops' 
 lands, tithes commuted and converted into a rent 
 charge, cathedral and chapter funds, all representing 
 together a capital sum of probably more than a hundred 
 and fifty million sterling. This vast national estate is 
 now wastefully cultivated ; if we may borrow a metaphor 
 from much of our land tenure, it is let below its 
 value to an unimproving tenant, who is tied down to old 
 methods of cultivation, and which brings in much less 
 return than it might do if otherwise distributed. It is 
 clearly the duty of Parliament, as trustees for the 
 nation, to break up this old farm, to let it out afresh, and 
 get the greatest possible return for it. We have pointed 
 out how this may be done with advantage to all parties. 
 The present lessees of this national farm are tied by the 
 clauses of their lease to cultivate it in only one way. 
 The Act of Uniformity binds them to one fixed type of 
 worship, which, however admirable in itself as a frame- 
 work of devotion, is too rigid and inelastic, and certainly 
 does not meet the needs of advanced Christians in one 
 direction, or of the illiterate in the other. For this 
 reason, and for others which we need not now 
 enumerate, the majority of the nation either stands out- 
 side this National Church, or conforms from sheer in- 
 difference. The first return of life in the Church always 
 wakens up something which is Dissent in all but name. 
 It was so with the Evangelical Revival of the early part 
 of this century, and so equally with the Ritualist 
 movement of our day. Both are frowned upon by the 
 
 172
 
 260 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 friends of Uniformity ; it seems as if life and order are 
 incompatible in a National Church. Be this as it may, 
 the remedy for this state of things is simple. Tem- 
 poralities and spiritualities must be separated at once, 
 and the spiritual saved by its separation from the tem- 
 poral. For those who desire the name of a National 
 Church, we would meet their case by applying these 
 revenues to national purposes of an educational character, 
 including sanitary and social science. We would offer 
 facilities, as in Ireland, for a Free Episcopal Church to or- 
 ganise itself, and take over the existing Churches and such 
 portion of the endowments as were not of the nature of 
 tithe. Into the details of this we do not enter, as here we 
 are dealing only with the principle of the question. We 
 are not so sanguine as to suppose that Dissent would at 
 once disappear with the Establishment, or that the cause 
 of offence being removed in the ascendancy of one 
 favoured Church, the other Churches would draw 
 towards it by natural attraction of the less to the 
 greater. But this we are sure of, we should hear less of 
 the rivalry of Churches. To apply Burke's paradox, when 
 all the Nonconformity had ceased, much of its morosity 
 would disappear also. We should hear little of the Dissi- 
 dence of Dissent, and what good men are sighing for in all 
 directions would follow. We should find an interchange 
 of pulpits, and liturgical and free forms of prayer would 
 be used in the same building. With regard to the 
 former we may here remark that the interchange of pul- 
 pits is illegal only in a technical sense, because the Act 
 of Uniformity shuts the door of the State Church to all 
 but episcopally-ordained ministers. It is the interpreta- 
 tion of that Act by the ablest ecclesiastical lawyers which
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 261 
 
 assumes that if it is illegal on one side to admit a Non- 
 conformist into Episcopal pulpits, it is equally illegal 
 for the Episcopalian to enter the pulpit of his Noncon- 
 formist brother, or to use any offices but those of the 
 Book of Common Prayer. With regard to the latter 
 difficulty the use of free prayer and forms interchanged 
 it would come of itself as soon as the straight-waistcoat 
 of the Act of Uniformity is taken off the clergy. All 
 must feel the deadening effect of a too rigid adherence 
 to forms. The Liturgy itself loses its beauty when it is 
 slavishly adhered to, as if there were a Darius-like 
 decree that no prayer should ascend to God save in one 
 set form of speech. Every spiritual mind must feel the 
 numbing effect of a monotonous repetition of one set of 
 phrases only. To do Dissenters justice, there are none 
 more ready to admit the stately rhythm and complete- 
 ness as a manual of devotion of the English Liturgy. 
 They are ready, in most cases, to use it in some 
 amended and modified form. What they object to is the 
 iron yoke of uniformity; and when compelled to be- 
 come Dissenters they assert themselves, as human 
 nature is only too ready to do, by regarding all litur- 
 gical forms as a restraining of the spirit. But this 
 narrowness in the other extreme would disappear in time, 
 as soon as the provoking cause of it had been removed. 
 We are not deluded with the vain expectation of a man- 
 made millennium ; but if anything would hasten on the 
 final reunion of Christendom, it is the removal of all 
 religious questions out of the sphere of statute law. 
 Too long has the State unfairly weighed down religion 
 in general, by throwing its sword into the scale of one 
 sect against the others. But for a miserable question of
 
 262 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 endowments which is a dubious advantage at best to 
 any sect Episcopalians would spring up to claim their 
 liberties, and with them their religious autonomy. If this 
 were conceded to them, Liberty would lead to Equality, 
 and Equality end in Fraternity. Thus, as the Caesaro- 
 Papacy is the last stage of descent of hierarchical 
 Christendom, so the goal we should aim at is a federa- 
 tion of Free Churches, with a maximum of internal life, 
 and a minimum of external organisation. The last 
 stage of the Church will thus be a return to the first, 
 when it was only the Kingdom of God set up in men's 
 hearts, and ruling by no other authority than that of 
 willing allegiance, the unity of the spirit in the bond of 
 peace, not the uniformity of the letter in the bond of 
 discord. 
 
 We have said enough to point out the evils of exist- 
 ing arrangements ; let us glance, in conclusion, at the 
 existing state of the controversy and the prospects of 
 Disestablishment in our day. There is no disguising 
 the fact that the Conservative reaction, whatever that 
 may mean in politics, is in religion a reality. It arises, 
 as all reactions do, from a composition of forces. The 
 age is in a state of transition ; old beliefs are losing 
 their hold on the mind new beliefs have not yet taken 
 their place. The result is that men, in a kind of 
 despair of truth, call in Church authority as a sort of 
 quietus to doubt. They neither entirely believe nor 
 disbelieve. In the one case they would outgrow a dog- 
 matic centre of authority ; in the other case they would 
 passionately overturn it. But, halting as they do 
 between these poles of extreme belief and disbelief, 
 they fall back on a kind of interim arrangement. No
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 263 
 
 type of Church order seems to them so convenient as 
 that of a National Church, which combines in itself so 
 many compromises. It is at once broad and narrow ; 
 national, yet denominational ; it is Protestant and 
 Catholic ; it touches Rome with one hand and Geneva 
 with the other ; its ministers are educated gentlemen, 
 planted out all over the country, who are little centres of 
 culture and civilisation. Moderation and the via media 
 are the very genius of the institution. It unites a rigid 
 uniformity of cult with a lax interpretation of creed 
 and dogma. It is not surprising, therefore, that it 
 should meet the wants of an age of transition. Men 
 can neither do with nor without religion. If they 
 desired religion for its own sake, they would leave it to 
 its own native forces ; for those who believe most deeply 
 in a Divine remedy for human wants and woes are not, 
 as a rule, impressed with the importance of Church 
 organisation and authority. On the other hand, the 
 average man of the world cannot dispense with religion 
 altogether. It provides a sanction, as he thinks, for 
 morality, a support for human laws, without which they 
 would crumble beneath their own weight. Whether he 
 believes in the popular doctrine of heaven and hell or 
 not, he still inclines to the view that the teaching of 
 future rewards and punishments under theological 
 sanction is important in some sense as a safeguard of 
 society. He may be a sceptic himself, but for that 
 reason he is all the more anxious, as Hume was, to 
 strengthen the supports of human law by sanctions 
 which he does not himself allow. We do not, of course, 
 imply that State Churchmen are sceptics, but we do 
 affirm that many sceptics are inclined to a State-regulated
 
 264 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 religion. The reasons for this are so obvious that we 
 need not recur to them. All history attests the truth 
 of the remark. The present age, more than any other, is 
 charged with tendencies of this kind. Science has sapped 
 one by one our traditional beliefs. Men of the world 
 say they have no longer either an infallible Book or an 
 infallible Church to fall back on. All is in a state of 
 flux ; and as for that third tribunal of conscience, or the 
 inner light, or private judgment enlightened by the Word 
 of God, this is too vague and fluctuating a standard to 
 guide the masses. It may suit a little sect of pietists, 
 some close corporation of Christians, who exchange 
 the password as they enter their Bethels ; but the mass 
 of mankind could never learn such Shibboleths as these. 
 This being so, men of the world ask for a moderate, 
 sober religion, with few dogmas and mysteries kept well 
 in the background, on which to rest their support of 
 morality. A national religion, equidistant from super- 
 stition, or the abuse of external authority, and fanati- 
 cism, or the abuse of internal authority, is to them the 
 happy compromise between faith and unbelief which 
 they are in search of. A recent writer on Establish- 
 ments, Mr. Harwood,* has put forth a defence of them 
 which amounts to this that there is nothing between 
 the age and utter unbelief but a State-regulated Church. 
 He describes a Free Church in a Free State as an 
 Indifferent Church in an Ignoring State. But Churches, 
 he adds, will not always remain indifferent, and then 
 States cannot afford to remain ignoring. The Church 
 meaning thereby the organisation for religion may 
 
 * Disestablishment ; or, a Defence of the Principle of a National 
 Church. By George Harwood, M.A. P. 368.
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 26$ 
 
 be broken up into a number of separate Churches, as it 
 has been by Dissent in England and America, and these 
 separate Churches may none of them be powerful 
 enough to rival the State ; but such a fragmentary con- 
 dition cannot long continue unless they grow to dis- 
 believe in the religion itself, and then a new religion 
 must be on its way. Men eventually become sick of 
 impotent isolations and paltry sectarian divisions. This 
 is the condition into which Englishmen are getting at 
 the present time ; and when such a condition comes, 
 they will either break quite away from religion, or will 
 long for the dignity and unity of a great Church. Such 
 a Church will then be revived either in connection with 
 the State or separated from it. But a great Church 
 cannot long remain separated from the State. Such a 
 Church will possess property, and the State, unless it is 
 to abdicate its position of being the supreme guardian 
 of property, will be called upon, sooner or later, to 
 interfere in the disputes of that Church in order to 
 decide as to the rights of its property. 
 
 The insinuation that the sect principle is played out, 
 and that either a National Church or utter scepticism is 
 the only alternative before us, is the mistake which 
 underlies this otherwise able defence of the Establish- 
 ment. This thought does not come to the surface 
 everywhere, but it is evidently in the writer's mind, and 
 seems to suggest the grounds on which he rests his 
 belief in a State Church. In common with many 
 educated men (for he is only representative of a large 
 class), he finds the sects narrow, traditional, and as 
 much bound up by formularies and trust deeds as if 
 they had an Act of Uniformity, and were held bound
 
 266 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 by subscription to Articles. If he does not describe 
 himself in Mr. Matthew Arnold's phrase on the side of 
 Culture against Anarchy, as the excesses of private 
 judgment on religious questions is described by that 
 caustic critic, it is evident that this thought is the ani- 
 mating principle of his revolt from Dissent and adhesion 
 to a State Church. We are not concerned here in 
 inquiring how far our popular forms of Dissent are 
 opposed to "culture," whatever that term means. It 
 must be admitted that culture and earnest personal reli- 
 gion are not always reconcilable, but that is only to re- 
 peat in other words that the wisdom of this world is often 
 opposed to the wisdom which is from above. It is an old 
 controversy ; it existed in our Lord's day, and has come 
 down to our own. It has been often discussed, and the 
 question been looked at in both lights, and argued on 
 both sides, long before Mr. Matthew Arnold borrowed 
 from German criticism the contrast between the Hebrew 
 and Hellenist type of mind. John Foster has an essay on 
 "The Objection of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion," 
 which shows that the essayist was not insensible to the 
 sins against good taste committed by Bible Christians, 
 chiefly arising from their being the students of one book 
 only. He does not forget, however, as critics of Mr. 
 Arnold's school do, to trace the aversion of men of taste 
 up to its spring head. He is careful to point out that 
 the true source of this aversion arises from the fact that 
 the estimate of the depraved moral condition of human 
 nature is quite different in revelation and polite litera- 
 ture. Consequently, the Redemption by Jesus Christ, 
 which appears with such momentous importance in the 
 one, is, in comparison, a trifle in the other.
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 267 
 
 There is no bridging over this contrast. To the end 
 of time there will be a " dispute between the Grecians 
 and the Hebrews," as we may call them, on this 
 aspect of the Gospel. It carries with it such humbling 
 estimates of unregenerate human nature, it lays so little 
 stress on man's attainments to recommend him to the 
 Divine favour; it commands all men everywhere to repent 
 in as thrilling tones even on Mar's Hill and to the culti- 
 vate of the ancient world, as if it were appealing, in the 
 speech of the men of Lycaonia, to a semi-barbarous 
 people, scarcely above fetish worship. This is the 
 offence of the Gospel, and it is not every day that 
 men of culture like Pascal, Vinet, and others we could 
 name, are content to become fools for Christ, in 
 the sense that the apostle of culture as we may 
 describe Paul was contented to be. If a man is not 
 prepared for this sacrifice, and in this sense to take 
 up his cross daily and follow Christ, he is not worthy 
 of Him. The disciple must not expect to be above 
 his Master ; it is honour enough to him to be as his 
 Master. This is why spiritual religion ever was and 
 ever will be an aversion to those who are merely men 
 of taste, and the question for the Christian is, not to 
 evade this difficulty, or to stoop to some base com- 
 promise, but boldly to face it, and count it honour to 
 suffer shame for His sake. The true Christian has never 
 shrunk from this. He may or may not be a member 
 of some National Church ; if, as Henry Martyn, he is so, 
 he will face the ridicule of the formalists and worldly 
 minded of his own cloth and profession. He will 
 belong to some sect within the State Church an 
 ecdesiola in ecclesid, as it has been described in order
 
 268 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 to reconcile his higher allegiance to Christ with his 
 conformity with the standards of an Establishment, 
 professedly meant to include professors as well as true 
 believers. We do not insist that a spiritual man is 
 bound to withdraw from a Church, the genius of which 
 is, that it is National first and only spiritual afterwards. 
 This question we leave to the decision of each indi- 
 vidual conscience; but we cannot abate the demands 
 of Christ to meet the necessities of a theory of the 
 alliance of such opposites as the Church and the world. 
 The first martyr, Stephen, sealed this truth with his 
 blood. He affirmed, when death stared him in the 
 face for saying so, that all the worthies of the Old 
 Testament had been uniformly rejected in their day, 
 and that killing the prophets and then erecting their 
 sepulchres would be the practice of National Churches 
 or the religious world (the two terms connote the same 
 idea) down to the end of time. 
 
 Thus that spiritual religion should be despised and 
 rejected as much in our day as in the past, is only 
 what we are bound to expect from the nature of the 
 case. We are not, then, discouraged by the fact that 
 evangelical religion is again passing over into the cold 
 shade of opposition. Earnest pietists in the National 
 Church find it a daily grief that they have to conform 
 with Rationalists on the one hand, and Romanisers on 
 the other. They are trying to purge the State Church 
 of these evils, how feebly and vainly is best known to 
 themselves. We do not wish to dishearten them, or to 
 prophesy failure ; but they must have learned very little 
 from the teachings of history if they expect to make a 
 National Church anything more than a reflection of the
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 269 
 
 mind of the nation on religious thought. Whether the 
 result of prosecuting Ritualists and Rationalists is worth 
 the cost, we must leave them to find out for them- 
 selves, as they will do in the long run. But we conclude, 
 as we set out, with the conviction that the Church and the 
 world are not allies, but opposites in this present divided 
 state of being, and as the result of that " original sin " 
 which the Pelagian or carnal intellect rejects as a theo- 
 logical figment. We are not concerned to vindicate 
 that truth in this place. We set out with it as the pos- 
 tulate on which all our reasoning on the subject is based. 
 If it is true, it carries with it more than a mere proposi- 
 tion in formal theology ; it colours our whole view of the 
 Church and the world, and their relations to each other 
 It carries with it the admission that the carnal mind is 
 enmity against God ; that Divine mysteries are foolish- 
 ness to the world; and that the psychical intellect cannot 
 understand the things of God, because they are spiri- 
 tually discerned. 
 
 In this point of view we are not in the least dis- 
 heartened because the true Church the Lamb's bride 
 is only a sect of "pietists," whether nominally or not, in 
 communion with some external and National Church. 
 That these "pietists " should fail to make their mark on 
 the age, or to found any external organisation imposing 
 enough to attract the world's lasting respect, is to us a 
 small matter. Nay, more ; we are ready to admit that 
 as soon as the pietist party, as they are called in Ger- 
 many, attempt to combine and form an external sect, 
 with passwords and traditions of their own, they, too, 
 miserably fail and break down. The history of sects, as 
 the Churchman derisively tells us, is a record of failure j
 
 2/o Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 it is endless splitting and subdividing, until, as Mr. 
 Harwood tells us, men of the world are wearied with 
 their divisions, and seek to find rest in the broad bosom 
 of some Catholic Church, which has at least a national if 
 not an oecumenical unity. This decline of the Free 
 Churches and the growth of an Erastianised type of 
 State-Church worship may dishearten timid Dissenters 
 of a traditional type. It may lead them to say that the 
 Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, has gone against them, and 
 in stress of weather they may make for port or the open 
 haven of Conformity. Be it so; it is not for us to judge 
 our brother or condemn him. But the more believing 
 course is to keep the sea in all weathers, and to trust 
 that when the danger is greatest the Master will be with 
 us, and that He will rebuke the winds and still the 
 waves. 
 
 ; As for success, it is nowhere the promise of the 
 Church ; she is promised preservation amid all perils, 
 and in the end a full deliverance. Meanwhile, without 
 courting defeat, Christians are to go on unconcerned 
 from one failure to another in the attempt to settle the 
 relations between the Church and the world. At one 
 time the world persecutes the Church, and anon she 
 patronises it. This is the sum of Church history for 
 six centuries. Then the parts are reversed, and the 
 Church, as the founder of a new society, creates a world, 
 which in the Middle Ages is alternately the rival and the 
 submissive slave of the Church. This carries us on to 
 the age of the Reformation. Here there is another turn 
 of the tables, and National Churches, that invention of 
 the Reformation, as VineUcalls it, spring into existence. 
 Their type is uniformly Erastian ; the world rules the
 
 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 271 
 
 Church, lest the Church should, as in the days of the 
 Papacy, again rule over the world. To use Queen 
 Elizabeth's expressive metaphor the State sits on the 
 saddle in front, and the Church on the pillion behind. 
 It is this arrangement which so charms writers like Mr. 
 Harvvood, and we suppose satisfies their spiritual 
 instincts. If this be so, we can only say they are 
 easily pleased ; but their ideal of the Church is scarcely 
 that of earnest Christians of any denomination, and, 
 least of all, of earnest Churchmen within the Establish- 
 ment. There only remains the last experiment, which 
 never has been fairly tried except in America, and 
 only there during the last sixty or seventy years. The 
 Pilgrim Fathers took over with them traditions of State 
 Churchmanship, which lingered on down to the Revo- 
 lution, and have only died out slowly in the light of 
 stern necessity. It is too soon, then, to dogmatise as to 
 the future of Christendom, but we may be certain of 
 one thing, that the Establishment principle has no 
 future. How long it may last where its roots in the 
 shape of endowment have struck down so deep in the 
 soil as with us, it is impossible to say. But its final 
 extinction is only a question of time. 
 
 Thus it is, that, whether we like it or not, we must 
 look to the sect principle of individualism as the plat- 
 form of the Church of the future. That it will fail to 
 subdue the world and remove the natural enmity of the 
 carnal mind, we are ready to admit. No spiritual man 
 is so foolish as to suppose that the sect principle is to 
 succeed where that of Catholic unity has failed. But its 
 failure in this latter case will be traced to its true source. 
 We shall not lay the blame, as Churchmen now do, on
 
 272 Conclusion and Recapitulation. 
 
 the State, and say that if properly supported and en- 
 dowed by the world, we should be able to convert the 
 world. We should know at once our strength and our 
 weakness, and it is as much to know the one as the 
 other. At present, under the alliance theory, it is the 
 old Jewish story of the lame man on the back of the 
 blind man trying to steal the apples, and as they were 
 partners in the crime, so in the punishment. In the 
 future, politicians and Churchmen will be responsible 
 only for their own failures, and since we are prepared to 
 expect the sect principle to fail, we shall feel no dis- 
 appointment when it does so. But its failure will at last 
 bring on the end when Churches and States, alike 
 carnal and corrupt through the inherent and ineradic- 
 able corruption of human nature, shall give up their dele- 
 gated authority. Then a kingdom will be set up in 
 which the existing distinctions of temporal and spiritual 
 shall disappear. Then cometh the end, when He shall 
 have put down all rule and all authority and power, for 
 He must reign until He hath put all enemies under His 
 feet. Thus Caesarism and Clericalism are only phases 
 of a moon which is gibbous, and not yet full. Partly 
 lost in the earth's shadow, she does not shine as yet in 
 the full light of her true sun. But when moving out of 
 shadow she comes in full opposition to the sun, these 
 Erastian and Ecclesiastical shadows, which are of the 
 earth, earthy, shall disappear, and she shall be seen 
 full-orbed, and, like the Bride in the Song of Songs, 
 " looking forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as 
 the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." 

 
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