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