V – The Papacy and the Reformation

      At the outset I must define the sense in which I take the name and the period of the Reformation.  I wish to look at the Reformation as a movement, a general and not a merely local movement; a stirring of new life, of new forces in many ways, and not a mere attempt to take away abuses, or even (on a different plane) to reform doctrine.  Towards the end of the Middle Ages there are many signs of coming change and of new life and vigour; the revival of learning, the renewed reforms of monastic life are some signs among many such.  This new life threatens to break up, or at any rate to weaken, the whole fabric of society.  Such times of change are common, such forces, social, economic, intellectual, and, above all, religious, may bring disaster, or they may bring in a better and a fuller life.  What the result may be depends partly upon the past, and partly upon the way in which the new movement is met, is handled and, above all, guided.  Change may mean progress, it may mean revolution, or, as is oftenest the case, it may mean a mingling of the two.  The characteristics of this time of change, the forces which were working to mould society and mankind, should be noted.

      But first I pause to remark that when it is a question of social forces, of movements, of changing currents, sometimes working together, sometimes working against each other, sometimes working independently, they must be observed over a long period of time; we get an incomplete and wrong picture of the time, we estimate the forces wrongly, if we look at them for too short a period.  If we want to know the complete truth, to reach the whole result, we must take in the complete period of time so that the forces have space to work themselves out.  Only in this way can we reach even approximate truth, only in this way can we estimate the forces rightly – we have to judge, as it were, of their direction, often changing, as well as of their speed.  If we apply these cautions to the Reformation it means that we cannot take just a few years at the beginning of the sixteenth century; we cannot take (as people continually do) just the short course of Luther’s life.  We must take in at least the whole of the sixteenth century, and ought to take in even half of the seventeenth.  This is what I propose to do.

      I now return to the great forces at work towards the end of the Middle Ages.  First must come undoubtedly the force of national feeling due to the formation of the great national states.  These great states were the result of mediaeval history.  Feelings of natural separation, if not jealousies, were the outcome of their rise.  The growth of these states had put a great strain upon the bond of unity within one great body of Western Christendom; on the political side the Holy Roman Empire had expressed this idea of unity, and that Empire had now practically passed away.  But the strain was felt also in the unity of church organisation; in any case, the strength of such unity would have been severely tested.  The central organisation of the papacy would have felt this difficulty increasingly.  Machinery that had worked easily when the dominant conception was that of a united Western world could not work so easily when the dominant conception was that of rival states.  If, as we saw a fortnight ago, the mediaeval papacy, with its complex theory and more complicated practice, was largely the creation of feudal times, the significance of this emergence of the national states is unmistakable.  Here was a historic force working against the papacy which earlier historic forces had helped to create.

      And the papacy had, by its own act and its own policy, entered the field of contending states.  Sixtus IV (1471–1484) had aimed at forming principalities for his relatives. [Ranke’s Popes, i. 43 seq.; Pastor, History of Popes, iv. (Eng, trans.), 231 seq.]  Alexander VI had bent the whole strength of the papacy towards the same dynastic end, sometimes trying to build up a dynasty of his own, sometimes trying to consolidate the papal states:

      He fills [says Lord Acton] a great place in history, because he so blended his spiritual and temporal authority as to apply the resources of the one to the purposes of the other.  The strain which his policy as an Italian Sovereign laid on the Church was fruitful of consequence in the next generation and for all time. [See Acton, Historical Essays and Studies, p. 67.]

When at the Jubilee of 1499–1500 over two hundred thousand pilgrims visited Rome, the proceeds of the celebration were given to Cesare Borgia, [See Pastor’s History of Popes, vi. (Eng. trans.), 148 seq.] to help him in his personal ambition and life.  The pope was to the sovereigns of the day an Italian prince above everything else.  He mingled in their market, he bought and sold the same wares as they did.  If his stall were a little higher, and his method a little more skilful than theirs, the advantage was due to the use of his spiritual power.  And the opposition to demanded reforms was due, not to ‘the corruption of courtiers, but to the plenitude of sovereignty’ of the pope. [Acton, Hist. Essays and Studies, p. 439.]  There is no need to labour the point.  Both the spirit and policy of the late mediaeval popes were worldly – sometimes evil, sometimes respectable, but always secular.  Popes might sometimes, like Pius III (1503) in his short reign, like Leo X at the ninth session of the Lateran Council, [See Pastor, iv. Pt. I. (German ed.), 564–5 (Bk. I. c. 12).] deal gently with Reform (1514), but little was done.  Julius II, a warrior, a diplomatist, and an Italian patriot, was, after a papacy of nine years, ‘interrupted by death just at the time when he was beginning to take the question seriously in hand.’¹  Julius, like the other popes, conceived that ‘his first official duty was the restoration of the states of the church in order to secure the freedom and independence of the Holy See.’  That accomplished, the papacy might turn to Reform.  This was the low ideal of the papacy at a time when reforms were urgently needed, and there was grouped around the popes a party that treated church and religion simply as a form of outward dominion.  For a short time a pope, bent first of all upon spiritual aims, was found in Adrian VI;² Paul III (1534–1549) was pledged to reform, and the celebrated scheme of reform drawn up in 1537 by a Commission of Cardinals and others brought³ improvement within reach.  Paul IV (Caraffa) was a reformer and an earnest man, if sometimes mistaken and over secular in his policy.⁴  Yet, broadly speaking, it was not until after the Council of Trent that the papacy was inspired by the spirit of reform, that, in the biblical expression of the day, Peter, being converted, could strengthen his brethren.  But the conversion was a tardy process.

      ¹The apology of Pastor for him, vi. (Eng. trans.), 449.  The few pages which follow are an interesting discussion of the merits of the Temporal policy.  The plea is that without the lever of the Temporal States the spiritual authority of the Pope would have been useless.  This is really a feudal conception.

      ²On the pathetic reign of this pious pope out of harmony with his surroundings, Whitney, Reformation, p. 39 seq.; Pastor, iv. Pt II. (German ed.), p. 62 seq.  (Bk. II c. 2 and a review of mine upon it in English Historical Review, 1910, p. 570).

      ³Whitney, Reformation, pp. 125–6.  See also Pastor, v. (German ed.), 117 seq. (c. 11).

      ⁴In his anti-Spanish fervour and its resulting political action.

      Not only were abuses, isolated and disconnected, to be found, but their existence was defended as based upon existing Roman practice. [Well described by Harnack, History of Dogma (Eng. trans.), vii. 5 seq.]  The argument was deceptively simple.  Whatever exists is based upon Roman custom, whatever Roman custom approves has a force, divine, or at any rate semi-divine.  This was in the end the main argument of many theologians. [As by Prierias against Luther.]  What the desired reforms were can be seen in the Centum Gravamina of Germany, [In Brown, Fasciculus, i. 352.  See Cambridge Mod. Hist., vol. i. chaps. xviii., xix., and vol. ii. chap. xviii.] and in other documents such as Colet’s famous Sermon before Convocation in 1512.  But beneath all these plans and details of reform we can see one chief current of Reformation thought.  Towards the end of the Middle Ages there is a shifting of the stress from the corporate to the individual life; the latter was now felt in greater force; men dared to go their own way, and under its impulse men took independent action.  This change we can see in politics, in literature, and in economics, as well as in religion.  The personal sense of sin, the impulse to individual judgment, the readiness to disregard the bonds of the Christian society were signs of its working. [On some aspects of this individualism see Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress.]  But individual energy, individual action, need guidance and instruction.  There was thus a special task laid upon the church of the day, and it is part of the tragedy of the Reformation how the church met this task.  Too often it tried to suppress [This would bring us to the treatment of heresy, to the work of the Inquisition, which must be regarded as a development of papal control in distinction from the old episcopal control.] this individualism, full of energy and importance, instead of educating it.  This deliberate policy was adopted for two main reasons.  There were, as there so often are, good and pious men who have not the large courage of their faith and dread the possible results of inquiry.  But there was a second cause, and that was the existence of the papal monarchy.  All discussions, all movements which might prove fatal to that monarchy were in the end stifled and suppressed.

      In speaking of medieval Christianity we noted the growth of papal control over the episcopate, and in the last lecture you saw the significance of the episcopate in the conciliar period.  The popes of that age had extended largely their control of benefices, and the existing practice along with the various concordats either gave the pope freedom in appointing bishops or sanctioned his right of confirmation.  The tendency was to degrade the episcopate and to exalt the papacy.  Many smaller matters, such as the limitation and regulation of indulgences, illustrate the change by which episcopal powers became centralised in the papacy.  As a result, closeness of touch between ecclesiastical organisation and national life was largely lost.  When at length the Council of Trent met (December, 1545) there were many matters calling for reform.  The emperor and others had indeed long been pressing for it.  It had seemed at one time as if a Council might compose the Lutheran troubles.  However that hope stood now, there were some who sought drastic dealing with well-known evils; there were others who wished for a clear restatement of doctrine.  The Council had a long and varied history.  In 1547 it was translated to Bologna, and then suspended; in 1551 it met again, but next year was suspended once more, and did not meet until 1562, when it sat for a year.  I cannot speak of its work in detail: enough to say that in discipline and organisation it did much.  In definition of doctrine, too, it did much, and had its Decree upon Justification by Faith come earlier it might have altered the course of religious history.  Undoubtedly the Council raised greatly the tone of the Roman church.  But some important details, both in worship and in life, had been left to the pope for settlement.  When at its close the question was put, Did they wish to ask confirmation from the pope for all they had decreed? one prelate alone – the Spanish Archbishop of Granada – voted non placet.  But the placet majority had really closed the long controversy between pope and councils.  Henceforth in the Roman obedience the pope was supreme.

      I have not spoken much, so far, about doctrine, and I have not done so because in effect everything turned upon this solid, coherent doctrine of the papacy. [This is well shown by Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. vii. chap. i.]  Theology was admittedly unpopular, except in two circles – one of them in Spain, where a reformation on the threefold lines of a high moral ideal, of scriptural study with a Thomistic theology, and of an invigorated discipline, had been already carried out under Ximenes.  The other was in the circle of the Erasmian school with its love for sound learning, its New Testament and patristic zeal.  Elsewhere theology was unpopular, and in an incoherent state of society there were many currents of thought, many conflicting schools.  The ‘legal system’ of Rome was everything.  The one thing that mattered was the acceptance of the papal right to rule and to decide.  The delay in calling a Council, and the shifty diplomacy which manipulated it when it was sitting, the papal mishandling of Luther, owing to the belief that his convictions were neither deep nor real – all these showed that no real guidance could be expected from the papacy just at the time when guidance was most needed for the safety of Europe.  The papacy had accumulated responsibilities and powers to itself, the life and power of the church were swallowed up in papal power and centralisation.  Hence came the administrative evils which all historians admit even when they palliate.  Hence came the uncertainties that must arise when a Government is thinking of its powers and its popularity rather than of its responsibilities.  It was waiting upon public opinion, it was seeking to manipulate forces connected or hostile among themselves.  Only too often popular or emotional practices or opinions crystallised into doctrines, and were cautiously or tentatively approved by the papacy when it seemed safe to do so. [This is well brought out in a Ch. Hist. Soc. Tract, No. xxvii., by Dr. T. B. Strong – Papal Corruptions of Doctrine.]  It is only when we look at the history of the Council of the Lateran (1512–1517), or the Council of Trent that this real papal secret of the Reformation age can be properly discovered.  The papacy was sometimes more tolerant than other church authorities, because it really cared less about the points at issue.  It sometimes sacrificed the prospects of more spiritual vigour or religious reform because it was thinking in the first place of itself. [The work of Susta, Die Rōmische Curie and das Konzil von Trient enter Pius IV, gives many illustrations of all this.]

      Such currents of reform as there were did not find their strength in the papacy; once again we see the strength which lay in opinions which had seemed to be conquered long before.  An expression of such opinions is to be found in Dean Colet’s celebrated sermon [Printed in Knight’s Colet, Appendix, p. 273, followed by an early English translation, p. 289.  Also a version by Smith (1661).  See Lupton’s Colet.] before Convocation in 1512, the very year of the Lateran Council.  It is often quoted as an admission of abuses and denunciation of them.  I refer to it here as an alternative scheme to the growing papal monarchy – an appeal to a more primitive constitution.  Colet urged that the ordinary resources of the church were adequate for reform; it is always easier to demand fresh machinery than to make full use of the old.  He pointed to the neglect of the old episcopal system – a neglect due to low ideals, and sometimes to political pressure.  Addressing the prelates, he pleaded with them that their office was a ministration, that high dignity in an ecclesiastical person is nothing but a meek service.  By pride, covetousness, and secular occupations bishops and clergy were over-much conformed to the world.  Abuses due to ecclesiastical courts and lawyers brought hatred and disrespect upon the church, and made the people of England ready to allow the king to humiliate it.  How were bishops and clergy to be transformed to the renewing of their mind?  His answer was (I summarise):

      Laws and Constitutions which are made already should be put in execution, and well kept.  Canonical election of Bishops after prayer for the guidance of the Spirit should be observed, for its neglect had given us a race of Bishops devoid of spirituality.  Bishops should be forced to reside in their dioceses, and the corruption of their jurisdiction should be restrained.  Above all, Councils, both General and Provincial, should be often called – for the neglect of them has been most hurtful to the Church of Christ.  Then when these laws were all put into force – a work in which the Bishops must lead by example and action – the clergy could begin to reform the laity.

This was a broad outline of reform upon ecclesiastical lines in the national sphere, something like the Reformation wrought out in Spain.  Some such scheme was proposed in Convocation, 1532, but was dropped amid Henry VIII’s attack upon the freedom of the church.  Aspirations – but only aspirations – after such a reform reappear under Cardinal Pole, but although his opportunities were favourable, he was too weak to carry them out.  The appearance and the reappearance of such a scheme is significant.

      It is a little difficult to disentangle the varied schools and parties at Trent.  There were the Spanish bishops, [See Maurenbrecher, Studien und Skizzen, I–II.] who knew the strength of a church reformed upon episcopal lines, with a theology distinct and learned if somewhat narrow.  It was a force that made for piety and that worked, not always in harmony with the papacy, within the limits of national life.  The two schemes of reform known respectively as the French and the German Libels of Reformation* (1562–3), presented to the Council, indicate something of the same wish for decentralised reform within the national allegiance.**  It cannot be too often remembered that while the church is a worldwide society, while its principles and its organisation belong to the world at large, its association into groups of special kinship, its division into provinces and dioceses, have always followed civil lines.  That principle of organisation, even if it brings with it difficulties, yet utilises and hallows the national, the territorial, life.  The disunion and the troubles following the Reformation were most acute and evil where, from different historic causes, the ecclesiastical and civil divisions, instead of agreeing, crossed and recrossed each other.  Switzerland, for instance, had no ecclesiastical organisation answering to the national limits; all its dioceses looked to metropolitans outside.  Many complications in the unhappy East of Europe have come about from the same non-coincidence of limits.  And it is certainly curious to note that the French and German Libels of Reformation, while alike in some points, have yet a distinctly national tone and national differences.  Thus we see the national life working, and in this case working for good, within the church.  But the presiding legates thought the German scheme hostile to Christian piety and unfit for the Council to hear, so Pius IV and Cardinal Borromeo selected from it some points only as suitable for discussion.  These schemes of reform, urged as they were, may be looked upon as signs of the new life stirring locally in various parts of the church; signs, too, of the deeper hold upon growing nations now made possible for religion; portents, if you like, of the danger to religion when these reforms were refused, and refused, moreover, in the interests of a central ecclesiastical power.

      *Whitney, Reformation, p. 204 seq.; Philippson, La Contre-Révolution religieuse au XVIe siècle, p. 447 seq.; Eder, Die Reformationschläge Kaiser Ferdinaends I auf dens Konzil von Trient – Pt. I.  Reformations-geschichtliche Studien and Texte, 1911.

      **The number and power of cardinals were to be lessened.  The princes were to undertake the task of reforming the church and altering the distribution of its funds.  Mass was to be in the vulgar tongue, clerical marriage was to be allowed.  The French Libel laid greater stress upon instruction of priests and bishops; Diocesan, Provincial, and General Councils were to be held at fixed intervals.  It demanded also the use of the vulgar tongue in services.

      In earlier sessions of the Council (V, VI) the duties of bishops as to visitations, especially of monasteries, and as to the provision of theological instruction, were enlarged.  But in some of these cases powers were given to bishops as delegates of the papal see rather than in their own right.  Controversy, however, arose upon the matter of residence of bishops in their sees.  Some contended that the obligation of residence was laid upon bishops by the law of God.  Others said that this obligation was purely ecclesiastical in origin, and therefore open to exception in admitted cases.  It was a vital question for the Curia, since the non-resident bishops were so largely found in Rome, and since Roman officials were often rewarded by the gift of bishoprics abroad, where they never meant to reside.  But some speakers at the Council affirmed the papacy to be the only bishopric founded by Christ, and all other bishoprics to be of papal institution.  Others drew a distinction; the episcopate was in itself of Christ’s institution, directly or indirectly, but its jurisdiction was derived from the papacy.  Non-residence allowed by the pope was, therefore, perfectly right.  The decrees of Session VI, therefore, while emphatic in sound, were really vague and general ; they only repeated principles when the real difficulty lay in their application. [Session VI, of Reformation, chap. i.]  This same question of episcopal residence came up again in the debates before Session XIX (which took place on May 14, 1562), and caused even greater excitement.  In seeking to enforce episcopal residence the Council reached discussions on its obligation, whether due to ecclesiastical or to divine law.  The evils of non-residence and the lack of diocesan supervision were admitted, but more lay beneath.  The Spanish bishops, conservative in their views and therefore diligent in their duties, in asserting the origin of the episcopate by the divine will, denied its dependence upon the papacy.  Cardinal Borromeo, whose definite but ineffective policy was to gain by delay what he called ‘the benefit of time’, was distressed for the papal power.  The legates, by an unusual arrangement, took a vote on the continuance of the debate.  Those against it, and those who wished to refer the whole matter to the pope, formed when put together the majority, and the debate was adjourned only to come up again on the debates upon Holy Orders before Session XXIII (July 15, 1563).  At this later time the political and ecclesiastical atmosphere was even more charged with excitement.

      Once again, the distinction between the Order of the Episcopate and its jurisdiction was insisted upon.  Not all were ready to admit that while the former was derived from God the latter was derived from the pope.  Here the Frenchmen were sceptical, although some would admit the papal right to regulate episcopal jurisdiction.  A decisive part in the debate was taken by the great Jesuit theologian Lainez, [See Lainez, Disputationes Tridentinae, ed. Hartmann Grisar, S,J., i. 1–391 – a volume to itself.] who, with a massive learning quite his own, discriminated between order, by the Law of God immutable, and jurisdiction, mutable by proper authority.  Yet a criticism of his materials for proof lessens the force of his arguments for us.  He assumed the forged decretals, and he contended by an argument essentially unsound that jurisdiction was given by our Lord to St. Peter alone, and by him delegated to the other Apostles.  The Spanish bishops, however, induced a minority of fifty to vote for the origin of episcopacy iure divino.  In the end, after much discussion and some diplomacy in draughtsmanship, the Eighth Canon (Session XXIII) was adopted: ‘If any one saith that the Bishops who are created by authority of the Roman Pontiff are not legitimate and true bishops, but are a human figment, let him be anathema.’  These words are really inconclusive in themselves, and evade many issues raised in debate.  But to later generations they seemed to assume the papal view of Lainez.  The power of the papacy was immensely raised, and the power of bishops, in spite of their greater efficiency of administration in later days, was lowered.  Bishops were in some matters expressly, in others tacitly, made into delegates of the pope.  There was some truth in the saying of Philip II of Spain – who had been induced to suggest silence to his bishops – that ‘Those who went to Trent as bishops had come back as parish priests.’

      To sum up, then, the main results of the Council of Trent.  Doctrine was defined, and asserted with much fullness, against innovations; discipline was strengthened, many abuses in practice were done away with; higher instruction was provided as a preparation for the priesthood; undoubtedly the church was made more efficient.  But the papacy, around whose power so many abuses had gathered, came out from the Council even stronger than before.  And with its greater strength, more especially with the stricter control of bishops (henceforth more efficient), there was less sympathy with divergent national tastes; there was a growing tendency to hold everything not purely Italian or strictly Roman as akin to evil, or at any rate dangerous.  The papacy had triumphed over the bishops, and had triumphed over the national life.

      So the process of history, for good or for evil, goes on; a fresh formulation of floating opinion starts an opinion on its career as a maxim; new generations look back to it as a starting point for the conditions under which they live, and then they again solidify those conditions into axioms of life.  Nations and churches, like men, read something of their own experience into their systems of thought, just as they mould their experiences by their principles.  Hence we see this same process – the development of papal power at the expense of everything else in the church – starting on a new career after Trent.  One or two details deserve attention.  In the years between the Council of Trent and the Vatican Council of 1870 it became customary to give bishops certain rights of absolution in reserved cases, of dispensations for marriage, of control over heretical books, and so on, as delegates of the papal see by faculty for a period of five years.  The same power which gave could take away.  The bishops were thus made to feel their dependence upon the papacy in a very real way.  At the Vatican Council this control, intensified by the arrangements for business, was very real.  It is not for me today to speak of 1870 and its results.  But I may remind you of what Döllinger said:*

      The new Vatican doctrine confers on the Pope the attribute of the whole fullness of power over the whole Church as well as over every individual layman. ... As every student of history and of the Fathers will admit, the Episcopate of the ancient Church is thus dissolved in its inmost being, and an Apostolic institution, to which, according to the judgment of the Church Fathers, the greatest significance and authority in the Church belongs, fades into an unsubstantial shadow.

      *Döllinger, Declarations and Letters on the Vatican Decrees, 1869–1887 (Eng. trans.), pp. 91–92.  On the faculties see L. Mergentheim, ‘Die Quinquennal fakultäten pro foro externo’ (Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen, ed. Stutz, 1908).

      What I wish to point out here by the quotation of these words is something often forgotten.  Our appeal against the papacy at the Reformation was an appeal to the primitive church, to the essential idea of the church against its Roman distortion.  It was an appeal against a fact – the fact of the papal usurpation; it was an appeal against a process – the exaltation of that central power at the expense of local life and freedom.  Such an appeal must be judged not solely by the facts of the day when it was first made; it must be judged also by the process of history since then.  The Anglican appeal of the Reformation has been one which later history has more than justified.  It was made at the cost of some historic associations which we value, and of a wide communion we regret.  But it bought for us a spiritual and intellectual freedom impossible in the Roman obedience; it kept for us a real continuity with the system of the primitive church – a continuity which has in essence been lost under the papacy.  If the English church made an apparent revolution in the Western church of its day, the blame of that revolution must lie with those of the Roman Curia, who had made a real breach with the primitive past, and have widened it increasingly ever since.  The Anglican appeal was justified in the age when it was made; it has been increasingly justified since even in our own generation.

      To pass to another side of the Reformation age – the relation between the papacy and the civil power in the national states.  Threats by rulers to withdraw their obedience from the papacy had been far from unknown.  Thus in 1499 it seemed probable that both Germany and Spain would renounce their obedience. [Pastor, vi. 67 (Eng. trans.)]  France threatened to call a National Council with the same result in 1510, and the assembling of the Schismatical Council of Pisa, supported by France, led Julius II to call the Council of the Lateran in 1512.  More than once during the Council of Trent itself the action of the papacy was stimulated by the threat from France, Germany, or Spain to declare its independence.  But they had then by that time the precedent of Henry VIII to fall back upon.  I refer to these things in passing merely to show, what is sometimes forgotten, that the action of Henry VIII was not an isolated case, that the breach between England and Rome was not, as is so often and foolishly said, due to his so-called divorce, or, rather, plea for nullity.

      Into the question of the divorce I do not propose to enter.  It raised directly the question of royal against papal jurisdiction; it brought up the question of royal supremacy, which had arisen at an earlier date under Henry, when Dr. Standish, Warden of the Grey Friars in London, was apologist for the Crown.*  In itself the divorce was a discreditable business, equally discreditable to Henry and to Clement VII.  The king had been so greatly struck with patriarchal polygamy (much in the style of Bucer later) that he contemplated it as a precedent for himself.  ‘If for them, why not for me?’  It was discreditable to him.  Clement suggested that the easiest way out of the difficulty was for Henry, without putting away Katharine, to marry Anne Boleyn and leave the future to care for itself.  It was discreditable for him, and indeed for many others who soiled their hands and their consciences with it.  But none the less the accidental cause opened up the way to greater questions.  Henry had studied his case against the pope.  Sir Thomas More had foreseen long before his imprisonment that the papal supremacy was the coming critical question, and accordingly had studied it for himself.  There had been in England, as elsewhere, much discontent with Roman jurisdiction and patronage, and the way it was exercised.  Adam of Usk, writing about 1415, said: ‘There (at Rome) everything was bought and sold, so that benefices were given, not for desert, but to the highest bidder.’ [Adam of Usk’s Chronicle, ed. E. M. Thompson, pp. 75–6.]  Complaints of long-drawn-out litigation were common, and the gravamina already spoken of show the feeling which existed.  But there is in England, at any rate, no theological repudiation of the papal rule on a large scale.

      *See Gairdner, Hist. of Eng. Ch. in Sixteenth Century, p. 42 seq. (and Brewer, Reign of Henry VIII, vol. i. chap. viii. at greater length).  The very interesting discussion arose from the criticism of an Act limiting clerical immunities.

      On the legal side, however, the case was different; there had been, and was, much argument, and the king found much support.  Stephen Gardiner, in earlier years an envoy of Henry’s and afterwards the well-known bishop, defended Henry’s position in his ‘De Vera Obedientia’;¹ there Gardiner attributes to Rome authority in the sense of reputation or influence rather than legal rights.  The primacy defined from the Scripture was one of service and use, not of dominion.²  Many things in the history and the literature of the Middle Ages could be appealed to as tending to show, if not actually proving, some independence on the part of the English church and of the English Crown.  But on these I do not care to lay much stress.  After all, the English church had accepted, as did the English monarchy, the existing mediaeval ecclesiastical organisation.  Henry’s action made a breach in that acceptance.  How far he meant to continue his isolation; how far – following the examples I have mentioned already – he withdrew his obedience as a threat or a means of pressure upon the pope might be discussed.  At any rate, he found it possible to continue in separation from the pope.  It is curious to note, on the other hand, how the papacy found it impossible to recognise the altered opinion of Europe in regard to its authority.  At the end of the Thirty Years’ War – in which the popes had been of small account – Innocent X protested against and annulled³ the Treaty of Westphalia on account of its not restoring to the church the territory it had lost, and for other reasons.  But ‘the papal protest was a matter of form.’  In 1701 Clement XI similarly protested against the exaltation of the Elector of Brandenburg to the kingship of Prussia, a protest which ‘was futile, as it was founded upon a state of things which had long ceased to exist.’  Without seeking the assent of the Holy See, the powers disposed of countries over which it had possessed, or claimed to possess, suzerain rights.⁴  The papacy had ceased to be what it most desired to be – an international power; it still sought after political dominion, and had not the courage to seek what was really within its reach – spiritual leadership and religious influence first of all.

      ¹Reprinted after the Hamburg edition of 1536 in Brown s Fasciculus, vol. ii., No. 71, p. 800.

      ²It is curious how largely Gardiner agrees with Wyclif in his De Potestate Papae, which embodies much of the common thought of Wyclif’s day along with some little original matter.

      ³By the Bull Zelo Domus Dei (Mirbt, p. 294).

      ⁴The quotations are from Funk’s Manual of Church History (Eng. trans., edition 1910), ff. 113 and 179 (see Mirbt, p. 303 seq.).

      The English national church soon proved to have kept its vitality and its power of government; but it had to pass through large and troubled waters.  Under Edward VI it was threatened with far greater doctrinal changes which did not in the end endure, changes which would have made the English Reformed Church something after the model of that of Sweden; under Mary by another exercise of royal power the papal obedience was restored; under Elizabeth the fluctuations ceased, and it is therefore with the Elizabethan settlement as the final form taken by the Reformation in England that we have to deal.  We must remember the caution I gave about judging by a view taken over the completed period of time.  The neglect of this caution leads to errors and injustice; it wastes time over matters of small and momentary importance, instead of fixing our eyes upon the great and lasting issues.  We, no more than papal apologists, are called upon to justify all that was done or all who wrought in our past history.  In a great conflict allies have to be taken as they come, and it is small wonder if England and the English church looked with friendly eyes upon those who, like themselves, suffered from papal enmity.  But religious principles are not dependent upon passing phases of thought.  We may be content to believe that our church learned something and gained some strength from its oppression under Henry VIII, from the ill-guided piety of some of the reckless leaders under Edward VI, the temporary discipline and the persecution under Mary.  As we come to the Elizabethan settlement we may remember all these phases, and their possible influences upon the permanent result.

      There may have been some things tentative about the policy of Elizabeth and her advisers in church and state.  But one thing we with our present knowledge may take for granted.  It was settled from the outset of her reign that there was to be a break with Rome.  The expression sometimes used that the experiment was to be tried of Catholicism without the Pope has been ridiculed.  But after all it expresses the primitive ideal – mediaeval changes and accretions to the earlier constitution might make the experiment difficult.  It is for us to notice its success.  We may perhaps be unable to say that at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth the body of the English people approved of what was going to be done.  By the end of the reign there was no longer any doubt.  We need not notice the errors of papal policy, the lack of sympathy on the part of the Curia with English feeling, but we have to notice the deliberate policy of England in church matters, the way in which the English church grew to be in the fullest sense the spiritual guide of the English nation.  That is the test of its continuous spiritual life.

      The Council wrote to Parker:*

      The Queen’s Majesty of late, in Conference with us upon the state of this her realm, among other things meet to be reformed, is moved to think that universally in the ecclesiastical government the care and diligence that belongeth to the Office of Bishops and other ecclesiastical Prelates and pastors of the Church of England is of late years so diminished and decayed as they point out in various ways, neglecting Church and Sacraments, that in fine the Bishops should take new care for ecclesiastical discipline and government.

      *See Cardwell, Documentary Annals, i. 350–5 (1569).  I do not dwell upon the obvious care taken in the selection and consecration of Parker.

Parker’s own words were:

      We will proceed with the Reformation begun, and doubt not by the help of Christ’s grace of the true unity to Christ’s Catholic Church and of the uprightness of our faith in this province.*

      *Quoted by Frere, Eng. Ch. 189.  Parker’s appeal to patristic example, especially Cyprian (Correspondence of Archbishop Porker, p 109 seq.), is most enlightening.

And it is particularly necessary to notice how the Queen defined her part and power in church matters; she did not take ‘any superiority to define, decide, or determine any article or point of the Christian Faith and religion, or to change any ancient ceremonies of the Church from the form before received and observed by the Catholic and Apostolic Church, or the use of any function belonging to any ecclesiastical person being a minister of the Word and Sacraments of the Church.’  In the statement of her positive duties which she goes on to give, the proper limits of royal action in church matters are clearly defined.  It is clear that she did not mean her royal supremacy to go as far as that of her father.*  It should be noted that her dealings with Parliament, checking them in action upon church matters which belonged to convocation, supports this position.  The church was to have its own self-government, and the Elizabethan settlement is not open to criticism on the ground of being based upon royal supremacy.  The Puritan attacks upon the English church reviled it as being too conservative, not following ‘the best reformed churches abroad.’  ‘The Order of Papistry, which they call the Hierarchy,’ ‘the ungodly title and unjust lordship of bishops,’ nay, even the Book of Common Prayer itself as ‘an imperfect book, culled and picked from the Papist dunghill,’ all came in for abuse.  Parker and his successors would have had an easier task had they either submitted to Rome on the one side, or, on the other side, given way to the extreme school of reformers.  We note that their position, ‘Catholicism without the Pope,’ was deliberately taken up.

      *Queen Elizabeth’s defence of her proceedings in church and state (after the Northern Rebellion), Ch. Hist. Soc. lviii.

      The later controversies due to the Book of Discipline show us the same thing.  It is from the church itself, and not from the civil power, that church life and government are held to proceed.  And we might go on to see how even men not at first of this way of thinking grew into the spirit of the church.  Grindal and Jewel both show us rulers of the church gradually influenced by the spirit of Catholic antiquity which the church possessed.  The seventh book of Hooker’s ‘Ecclesiastical Polity’ serves to make this position clear.  Here lay the strength of the Anglican argument.  It was a position reached amid the stress of controversy; it was a clear and balanced statement of principles which were forcing themselves into men’s view.  It was consonant with the patristic tradition; it stood the test of Scripture; it was founded upon learning, and so learning it was able to foster.  It gave us the massive erudition of some of our reformers and their successors.  It sacrificed something of the purely Western and special type of unity which mediaeval times had produced.  It gave up the special papal form of unity, and thereby undoubtedly lost some advantages at the time and ran some risks.  But, on the other hand, it gained what we today can understand in greater fullness – a spiritual and intellectual freedom impossible within the Roman obedience.  And – although here comes something which belongs to another of the subjects in our course – it made possible the closest connexion between the national life and the church with its bend of religion.  There was, then, gain on the side of learning and of freedom; there was gain, moreover, on the side of the national life.  But there was an apparent loss of Catholic unity, with associations and memories that are dear to us, and on that side there might lie future dangers and risks.  That risk could only have been avoided by a submission to the apparently easy and historical, really illogical, unhistorical, and unCatholic, doctrine of the papal supremacy.  That doctrine was to take a more and more exclusive form, to develop claims to be more and more the only doctrine, the only principle of church government, that was essential. Escape from this growing tyranny of papalism could only be won by revolution. But revolutions differ in what they lose and in what they keep.

      The English church was driven by its new appeal, its revolution, if you like, to a wider and more historic basis of unity than the ever-growing papalism cared to claim.  (Hence came our sympathy with the Eastern church.)  It threw itself upon the entire fullness of the church’s historic past; it claimed the growing richness of the national life.  Neither of these would have been possible for it with the acceptance of papalism, even in its then existing form.  So if the revolution can appeal for its justification to the history of papalism since then, it can also appeal to the history of the English church in later days.  There were bound to be dangers; there were bound even to be separations.  Presbyterianism, with its assertion in England of the sinfulness of episcopacy; Independency, with its denial of any visible church beyond the limits of a congregation; the Baptists, with their assertion of ‘a gathered Church,’ the small body of the elect – these led to separations, and through separations to loss which after-ages have had to mourn and, if possible, to repair.  But we claim for our church that in a day when it was difficult to choose, when choice might mean spiritual destitution or fleshly martyrdom, it chose aright.  Its argument was an appeal to the past; its justification was an appeal to the future.

VI – National Churches

      ‘Omnis autem concordantia differentiarum est.’  The principle here enunciated by Nicolas of Cusa is fundamental. [De Concordantia Catholica, I. i.]  Loyalty thereto is the true security for freedom.  The unity of the church is no more than that of the state, to be defined by an abstract doctrine of omnipotence.  It arises from that bond of love which unites a variety of living wills, so that ‘the multitude of them which believed were of one heart and one soul.’  A synthesis of living wills is the true notion of unity, not a machine functioning exactly in obedience to an external hand.

      On this ground every element in the church must have its real part therein – the individual, the parish, the diocese, the province, and any other group that has a relatively permanent quality of life.  The problem of all authority is everywhere the same.  How to preserve the unity of the whole while allowing for the due functioning of the parts, and recognising that their life is inherent, not merely derived.  The ultramontane doctrine derives every kind of power (except the purely sacramental) from the pope, who is really the only person recognised.  The Catholic doctrine sees in the pope only one among many of the officers of the church.  It believes in the Holy Ghost working through the whole, and expressing itself in each living part, whether individual or corporate.  What place in this teeming union of life is to be assigned to national groups?  They are not of today or yesterday, and count for much in the makeup and constitution of every man.  I shall briefly consider today, first, certain steps taken to assert the rights and liberties of national groups inside some churches of the Roman obedience; secondly, some relevant points in the history of the English church; and, thirdly, some of the general principles at stake, both as to the power and the limits of national groups within the church.

      Since the object of the church is the redemption of the world, it must at any moment consider the world as it is.  During the early period of development the great imperial unity of Rome was the cardinal social fact in the lives of most Christians.  No wonder that a conception of church unity arose which was but the medal of empire on its reverse side.  When, however, the empire in the West began to break up, and the new nations rose into consciousness, it was not possible to ignore the fact.  Efforts were made to convert them, which were largely successful.  Yet alike in Spain, in Gaul, and in Britain, if we may so call it, much independence was allowed, and more claimed.  The classical home of national independence was France.  We cannot, with all our ingenuity, lay claim to any such a complex of privileges as the Gallican liberties, although Matthew Paris affords evidence how strong was the anti-papal feeling in England at the very height of the papal power. [For a criticism of Matthew Paris see Mr. A. L. Smith’s Ford Lectures, ‘Church and State in the Middle Ages.’]  It was, however, France which most successfully asserted a relative independence, for these liberties were not incompatible with a strong loyalty to the Roman primacy, as a primacy.  Paris in its University was, as we saw earlier, the centre of the reforming movement of the fifteenth century.  In the steps taken to withdraw from obedience to the pope, Benedict XIII (Petrus de Luna), we see the germs of the doctrine of 1682, and a modern ultramontane discerns therein all the noxious microbes of antipapal nationalism.  In 1438 Charles VII, in the famous ‘Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges’, proclaimed the rights of the French church and the strictly limited character of the papal monarchy.  This was abolished by the Concordat of Bologna (1517), by which Leo X got the better of Francis I.  From henceforth the principles of Gallican freedom might still be held intact, but pope and king were really in collusion to destroy the rights of the church.  In fact, absolutism triumphed alike in church and state.  Later on a Fenelon could complain that these so-called liberties were really slavery.  The rise of the poliliques in the sixteenth century; the resentment aroused by the Ligue, which was an anti-French institution working in the interests of Spain; the vigour of the Parlement of Paris; the fury of the whole people at the assassination of Henry IV – these and other facts concurred to produce from time to time strong reassertions of Gallican rights, and a denial of the least defensible part of papal authority.  But the Jesuits were always there to win back the ground lost.  At length, under a pope with Jansenist sympathies, the Jesuits for the time being turned against him.  In the case of the régale the original wrong was mainly done by Louis XIV.  In the Assembly of 1682 Bossuet is the figurehead rather than the leader; the four articles were the policy of Colbert, though Bossuet drew them up.  Ultimately the king gave way, and a form of pacification was devised which was a retractation all but in name.  The defence of the four articles by Bossuet was not published until 1745, for the Crown refused its permission.  Nor can we be certain that we have Bossuet’s final views.  Much of this book is occupied with the ground which I covered the other day; and another part with the political claims of independence from papal interference; but one element in it deserves notice here.  Towards the close of his book Bossuet considers the question of particular churches.  He argues at length that the individuality of nations shall be recognised, and shows how in times past the iron uniformity beloved of ultramontanes was not required.  He does not go very far.  Bossuet was not an ultramontane, but he was a strong papalist.  He is of more importance in the strong case he makes out for the principle of consent.  He will not allow that papal decrees of themselves create law, but only so far as they meet with general assent.  ‘Laws they are not, which public approbation hath not made so,’ is not a mere tag of Hooker’s, but it goes right back to the mediaeval theory of law.

      The eighteenth century was in full blast when Bossuet’s work appeared.  His ideas, which, like those of all these Gallicans, hark right back to Gerson and d’Ailly and Zabarella, were to fructify elsewhere.  About the same time as Bossuet’s work appeared under the patronage of his worthless nephew (the Bishop of Troyes), the Elector of Trèves was having the ancient gravamina of the German nation against Rome examined, and Johann Nicolaus von Hontheim was deputed to examine the subject.  Born at Trèves in 1701, Hontheim had learned Gallicanism of van Espen at Louvain, and became Bishop of Myriophyti and Coadjutor Bishop of Trèves in 1788.  Hontheim took the nom de guerre of Febronius, and published in 1763 his great work, ‘ Destatu ecclesiae et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis’ (Liber Singularis).  This was the beginning of Febronianism.¹  The book itself is not very novel.  But it has the eighteenth-century clearness.  It is a definite programme in fundamental principles.  As the nuncio said in an interview with Hontheim, ‘Fébronius mettait toutes ces choses dans un point-de-vue, où elles n’avaient jamais été.’²  The author points out that the true holders of power are the bishops, and differs from the earlier conciliar writers in being able to make more use of the fact that the Isidorian decretals were now acknowledged forgeries.  While anxious for General Councils, if they can be held, what he looks to is to National Councils – i.e. to the reformation effected by each territorial prince.  As a Roman Catholic bishop, Febronius asserts the primacy of the pope; nor does he show any desire to get rid of it.  But he feels with Puffendorf that the church is not a state; and that harm is done by this attempt to assimilate her to an Empire.  Christ is the true Head.  This view had been adumbrated at Constance.³  Ultimately, after many intrigues and controversies, Febronius was forced into a recantation in 1778.  The book breathes a somewhat different atmosphere from that of Bossuet.  Moreover, it was intended to take the offensive.⁴  Bossuet merely defended what had been done, Febronius wanted a great national movement.  Of the Gallican liberties, he felt, like others, that they were not mere privileges, but the natural rights of a local church.⁵  As I have said, the ultramontanes took up the challenge quickly enough.  Were there to be any followers on Febronius’s side?  Fortunately there were; although their activity did not result in ultimate success.  The Emperor Joseph II was imbued with Febronianism; and his four archbishops – those of Salzburg, Mayence, Trèves, and Cologne – sent commissaries to a congress at Ems in 1786, which met to protest against the papal intrusions and fresh nuncio intrigue.⁶  The articles of Ems, as they were called, did little more than repeat the Latin articles of Coblentz, which embodied the ideas of Hontheim.  These, however, led only to failure.  Since the bishops were claiming the right to issue dispensations themselves, papal revenues would be seriously affected.  Pressure was put on the emperor and the Elector of Trèves, and the movement all came to nothing.

      ¹Bishop Nielsen in the History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century has two interesting chapters on Febronianism and its companion movements.  Otto Meier’s Febronius is the most complete study.  Appendix II is an interesting contemporary life of Hontheim, written in French by a friend and relative, Andreas Adolf von Krufft.  J. Kuntziger’s Fébronius et le Fébronianisme is also valuable (1889).

      ²‘Je lui réspondis, qu’il n’était pas croyable que le principes de Fébronius eussent été inconnus jusque-là aux nations; parceque ce livre n’était qu’une compilation ou collection des matériaux répandus dans différents ouvrages, surtout dans les ouvrages francais, connus de tous les savants.  Sur quoi it me répliqua, que cela était bien vrai; mais que Fébronius mettait toutes ces choses dans un point-de-vue, où elles n’avaient jamais été.’ – Krufft, Vie de Fébronius, 1780,’ in Meier, p. 269.

      ³Dr. Johannes Zillich in his brochure on Febronius thinks that the English constitutional system influenced Febronius.  This may be true; for there is a long quotation from Locke.  But Zillich does not realise, that the whole theory known as Whiggism itself was developed largely from the conciliar authorities. – Cf. Febronius, p. 16.

      ‘Bei einer genaueren Prüfung der Ausdrücke and definitionen, deren sich Hontheim bei seinen kirchlichen Verfassungstheorien bedient gewinnt man den Eindruck, als wenn sein Gedankengang von dem englischen Konstitutionalismus and den französischen Schriftstellern beeinflusst wäre, welche für die konstitutionelle Staatsform, wie sie in England beherrschte, in ihren Schriften eintraten.  Was ins besondere Montesquieu von der Trennung der drei Gewalten in Staates auseinander setzt ist hier auf kirchliche Verhaltnisse angewendet.’

      ⁴Überschauen wir das ganze Werk, so leuchtet ein dass wir es im Febronius mit dem Aufbaue eines wohl durchdachten Systems zu tun haben, fundiert anf den Grundsätzen, zu denen der Verfasser in einer langen, ernsten, Lebensarbeit gelangt war and dass wir nicht bloss ‘eine aus jansenistischen, gallikanischen und protestantischen Schriften zusammengesetzte’ Kompilation vor uns haben, wie es sogern von kurialistischer Seite hingestellt wird. – Zillich, p. 34.

      ⁵‘At haec omnia et singula non tam esse Ecclesiasticas Libertates unius populi quam genuini Iuris communis.’ – Feb. viii. 1, 553.  Cf. also Hotman, who says the same thing.

      ... Car ce n’est point un privelege n’y un droit aquis par les Français, mais c’est une franchise de aquelle ils jouissent en leur premier éstablissement. ... Les libertéz de l’Eglise Gallicane ne sont point concessions de Papes; ce ne sont point droits acquis outre on contre le droit commun.  Car pour s’être conservée en liberté plus qu’autre nation qui soit Catholique, on ne peut pas dire qu’elle ait ésté affranchie ainsi, elle est franc et libre de sa première origine.’

      ⁶Fébronius et le Fébronianisme, J. Kuntziger, 1889.  Chap. xi. shows the direct influence on Joseph II.

      More important was the effort of Scipione da Ricci in Tuscany.  Tuscany was governed by the Grand Duke Leopold, brother and afterwards successor to Joseph II, who was, like his brother, resolved on initiating reforms.  Ricci, who was Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, restored synodical action in 1786, and in his diocesan synod decrees were passed accepting the four Articles of Paris, and asserting legislative authority for the bishop in his synod.¹  Leopold intended a regular national reform; but the synod which he summoned at Florence was opposed to Ricci.  The death of Joseph II, followed by the departure of Leopold, took away support from the bishop, and he resigned his see in 1791.  Probably a German pamphleteer of 1839 is right in saying that the failure of Febronianism was a disaster even to the papacy.²  If the churches had been nationalised, it would have been more difficult to upset them at the Revolution.  It is a pity that so little is known in England about this very interesting, sane, constitutional movement.  Unfortunately, while Hontheim and Ricci were disinterested and pious, the same could not be said of all their supporters, and it was not unfair to brand some of these as mere worldlings and Voltairean.³  English churchmen ought not to be ignorant of these doings.  They prove that England is not a mere freak in ecclesiastical history, but that the same instincts and principles on which alone our system can be defended were at work, and at work for many centuries, in other nations.  Their unsuccess, no doubt, is an argument in favour of the ultramontanes, who might seem to be justified on the principle of natural selection.  Only it has long been admitted that the survival of the fittest is not the same thing as the survival of the best.

      ¹‘Io penso che in ogni Diocesi il Vescovo e il Presbiterio formino una unione non di padroni e di servi, ma di parti di un solo edifizio, di rami di un solo tronco, e di membra di un solo corpo.’ – Ricci, in Atti e Decreti del Concilio Diocesano da Pistoia, 4.

      ‘Le Constituzioni Sinodali furono in ogni tempo considerate come it corpo legislativo della Diocesi, e queste per lo più aprirono la strada aile plenarie decisioni della Chiesa universale, o almeno delle Nazionali Assemblee.’ – Atti, Session VII. p. 249.

      ²Die Gallicanischen und Deutschen Freiheiten.  Bossuet, Hontheim, und die Erzbischöfe zu Ems and Pistoja an die Katholische Geistlichkeit deutscher Nation.  Mit einigen Actenstücken des Congresses zu Ems und der Synode zu Pistoja.’ – Leipzig, 1839.

      ³It is interesting to compare the following passages:

      So finalmente non essere secolaresca la Potestà della Chiesa, la cui forza è tutta posta nella santità nel lume nella persuasione e nel discreto uso delle armi spirituali, nè essere una monarchia o un dispotismo il Regno di Gesù Cristo stabilito su questa Terra.’ – Ricci, Atti e Decreti del Concilio Diocesano da Pistoia, 3.

      ‘That God did intend His Church should perpetually subsist united in any one political frame of government is a principle which they do assume and build upon, but can nowise prove.  Nor, indeed, is it true.  For if the unity of the Church designed and instituted by God were only an unity of faith, of charity, of peace, of fraternal communion and correspondence between particular Societies and pastors, then in vain it is to seek for the subject and seat of universal jurisdiction.’ – Barrow, Treatise on the Papal Supremacy, p. 218.

      Let us pass to consider the more immediate topic of the national church in its concrete and very solid form in England.  It will be well to take first that notion of it which was dominant until the Revolution, and to a large extent for a long while later, then we shall discard all those theories which have been torpedoed by toleration and the consequent religious heterogeneity of the modern state, and ask whether the term national church has any meaning nowadays, and if so, what?  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nobody had any doubt that, if there was any church at all in a country, it ought to be national.  It might, like the Gallican church or the Spanish, be part of a larger whole and subject to government from without; but it was national in this sense, that it was the nation on its religious side, that it was supposed to be co-extensive with the nation; and that exceptions to it, such as, e.g., the Jews, were felt to be merely a permitted anomaly.  Famous words of Hooker express this:

      When we oppose the Church, therefore, and the Commonwealth in a Christian society, we mean by the Commonwealth that society with relation unto all the public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted; by the Church the same society with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides; when that society which is both a Church and a Commonwealth doth flourish in those things which belong unto it as a Commonwealth, we then say ‘the Commonwealth doth flourish’; when in those things which concern it as a Church, the Church doth flourish; when in both, then the Church and the Commonwealth flourish together. [Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, viii. 1 ; Works, iii. 420.  Hooker is aware that this is not the view of his opponents.  Theirs he puts in these terms, ‘Even in such a politic society as consisteth of none but Christians, yet the Church of Christ and the Commonwealth are two corporations each independently subsisting by itself.]

This represents the view of all, or nearly all; until the Presbyterians in the seventeenth century and the Regalists in France, with the Jesuits also to some extent, developed the doctrine that church and state were two distinct societies.  Throughout the Middle Ages, and in the Reformation period also, the relations between church and state, whether good or bad, were not envisaged as we envisage them.  Conflicts between church and state were conflicts within the same society on the part of two different officers, king and pope, or bodies of officers if you like; and the church in these conflicts means the hierarchy, and churchman means clergyman, just as statesman still means not a member of the state, but one especially expert or inexpert in politics; that ‘crafty and insidious animal called a statesman or politician.’ [I have tried to set this out in detail in a paper, ‘Respublica Christiana,’ delivered to the Royal Historical Society, and republished as an Appendix in Churches and the Modern State.]  Toleration is not to be thought of.  As Barrow puts it:

      It is convenient that the subjects of each temporal sovereignty should live as in a civil, so in a spiritual uniformity, in order to the preservation of goodwill and peace among them, for the beauty and pleasant harmony of agreement in Divine things, for that more commodious succour and defence of truth and piety by unanimous concurrence. [Treatise, p. 673.]

Uniformity was the ideal and ruled the apologetic of the Carolines no less than it did that of their opponents; nor were the Puritans different in principle; for they would tolerate none but minor differences, and neither in the Commonwealth nor in America would allow religious liberty.  There were a few exceptions, such as the Quakers, William Browne, and so forth, and some of the Baptists; but, taking the world as a whole, we may say that uniformity was the ideal, and it remained such long after it had ceased to be the practice.  It reigns still in many minds – that is to say, there is no question but if a church exists in England it is national.  To quote Barrow once more:

      Very equal it is that laws should rather be framed, interpreted, and executed in every country with accommodation to the tempers of the people, to the circumstances of things to the civil state there, by persons acquainted with those particulars than by strangers ignorant of them and apt to mistake about them. [Ibid. 284.]  Whereas now Christendom is split into many parcels, subject to divers civil sovereignties, it is expedient that correspondingly there should be distinct ecclesiastical governments, independent of each other, which may comply with the respective civil authorities in promoting the good and peace both of Church and State.  It is fit that every prince shall in all things govern all his subjects. [Ibid. 311.  Cf. also 584.]

      The Reformation made at the first no real change in this ideal.  What it did change was the ultimate depositary of authority.  Starting from the doctrine that there was only one source of power because there was only one society, the canonist party had concentrated all final authority in the pope as the supreme spiritual head.  Erastus – and his position is very little different from that of all divines of the Reformation – concentrated it in the prince, as sovereign by divine right, wielder of the sword of justice, with power immediately from God; and neither from pope, clergy, nor people.  Thus it is the lay power which is ultimately supreme in the Reformation theory, although it did not, in most of its representatives, take the form of asserting for it the right to administer the Sacraments or teach.  The ancient theory of the church derived from the Christianised Empire of Justinian was this – the emperor was an officer in the church, and his duty was not only to defend it, but to see that its canons were obeyed, as in our Act of Uniformity, to ‘visit, redress, reform, and order all manner of abuses, enormities, contempts, &c.’  This was expanded by divines in England and the Continent into the theory of the godly prince, ‘most religious’ by his office, with the Lords of his Council, whose task is ‘to administer justice, and to maintain truth.’

      Now this fact must be faced, for it affords the only serviceable theory of continuity.  One thing is certain about the apologists of the church of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – all believed the continuity of their church with its past; all, even Jewel, assert its catholicity;¹ all would say, with Archbishop Bramhall, ‘I like the name of Catholic well, but the addition of Roman is in truth a diminution’; all asserted that particular churches had a relative independence, a right of reforming themselves, and that the actual proceedings of the Reformation had not destroyed the Catholic continuity of the church.  They said this although they were well aware that some parts of the change were characterised not only by violence, but by very considerable intrusion of the secular authority.  To understand their position we must bear in mind this – the lay power is not regarded as something outside the church.  It is not the intrusion of an alien society, but the work of the highest civil authority in a state uniform and Christian.  Even Erastus himself said that he was considering only the problem of the relations of the two powers in a state where one religion, and one only, was tolerated, and that the true one.²

      ¹A Just Vindication of the Church of England, Works, i. 109, also cf. slips.  ‘We believe that there is one Church of God, and that not, as formerly amongst the Jews, confined to one corner or kingdom, but Catholic and universal, and extending over the whole earth, in such a manner that no nation whatever can justly complain of being excluded from the Church, and incapable of belonging to the people of God.  We believe, also, that this Church is the kingdom, body, and spouse of Christ; that of this kingdom, Christ is the sole monarch; of this body the sole head; of this spouse the sole bridegroom; that there are various orders of ministers in the church, that some are Deacons, others Priests, others Bishops, to whom the instruction of the people, and the care and management of religious concerns are entrusted.  And yet we maintain, that there neither is nor possibly can be any one man appointed to exercise supreme control over the whole Church.’  Jewel, Apology for the Church of England, i. 109.

      ‘I say, when all this shall be cleared, and the schism is brought home and laid at the right door, then we may safely conclude, that by how much we should turn more Roman than we are (whilst things continue in the same condition) by so much we should render ourselves less Catholic.’ – Bramhall, A Just Vindication of the Church of England.

      ‘The Roman Church and the Church of England are but two distinct members of that Catholic Church, which is spread over the earth.  Therefore Rome is not the house where the Church dwells; but Rome itself, as well as other particular Churches, dwells in this great universal house, – unless you will shut up the Church in Rome, as the Donatists did in Africa.  I come a little lower.  Rome and other national Churches are in this universal Catholic house as so many daughters, to whom under Christ the care of the household is committed by God the Father, and the Catholic Church the mother of all Christians.  Rome as an elder sister, but not the eldest neither.’ – Laud, Conference with Fisher, Works, ii. 346.

      ²I have tried to show the true import of Erastus in a lecture published in the Appendix to The Divine Right of Kings (second edition).

      The question of continuity is not, as is sometimes argued, the question of legal and historical continuity.  All that may be demonstrated, while the papal contention that we are not the inheritors of the mediaeval church remains untouched.  Nor again is it the question argued years ago by Mr. Gladstone, whether the changes in the sixteenth century were constitutional in the sense that they were the work of the hierarchy, and conformed to the legal traditions of the church.  Suppose they did, that would not matter if papal jurisdiction is its essence.  Suppose they did not, which seems to me much more probable, irregularities of procedure do not of themselves determine the life of a society.  It is not easy to destroy a living society.  No amount of sophistry can obscure the fact that there was a real constitutional break in 1688.  Nobody, however, thinks that that means that the English body politic has not a life continuous with the past.  So with the Reformation.  Be it that the change was violent, revolutionary, be it that the civil power interfered more than was wont, at any rate recently, that would not destroy the life of that religious society we call the church of England.  Nor would that life cease to be a part of the Catholic church, an organic part of it, on two conditions – 1. The papal jurisdiction must be held to be an accident.  It cannot be the essence of it.  2. Particular churches, as Laud said, must have real inherent powers – i.e., that relatively compact group of the Catholic body we called a national church must have within it a life not merely derived from the centre; and it must be capable, if necessary, of acting on its own.  As Laud said:

      If the Roman Church will neither reform nor suffer reformation, it is lawful for any other particular Church to reform itself, so long as it does it peaceably and orderly, and keeps itself to the foundation and free from sacrilege. [Conference with Fisher, p. 174.]

Nor will it be of final importance, if the power resides in the whole church, whether or no the laity take an extra share in it.  The point is not whether what the lay power did was wrong (which may be true), but whether it was that kind of wrong which breaks up a corporate society – that society being by definition ‘the Body of Christ.’  The hierarchy was a vested interest, or rather a congeries of vested interests.  All the difficulties which had stopped reform were the perennial obstacles created by vested interests.  This had been seen so early as the fifteenth century, and indeed earlier.  It was the cry of Dietrich of Niem that if neither the pope nor the cardinals would call a council, recourse must be had first to the local hierarchy, but ultimately to the citizens themselves, and even the poorest old woman.  Zabarella and the rest appear to have felt not only that Sigismund was a new Josiah, but that lay intervention was really needful if they were to get things done.  Now the Caroline divines were great students of the conciliar writers, and make much of citations from d’Ailly, Gerson, and Zabarel, as they call him.  In both cases the argument is the same; the only real Head of the church is Christ, the Holy Ghost is diffused in the whole church.  Nobody, hardly even the Council, has the authority of the whole church.  Desperate diseases demand desperate remedies.  In case of necessity the important thing is to get the reform done, not to trouble as to how it is done.  It seems to me, then, that the case for the continuity of the church with the past rests on these considerations.  Papal jurisdiction is not necessary, because power does not flow into the church from him, but from Christ through the whole.  That is fundamental; I cite Laud once more:

      First, then, I consider whether all the power that an OEcumenical Council hath to determine, and all the assistance it hath not to err in that determination, it hath it not all from the Catholic universal body of the Church and clergy in the Church, whose representative it is?  And it seems it hath.  For the government of the Church being not monarchical, but as Christ is Head, this principle is inviolable in Nature: Every body collective that represents, receives power and privileges from the body which is represented; else a representation might have force without the thing it represents, which cannot be.  So there is no power in the Council, no assistance to it, but what is in and to the Church.  But then it may be questioned whether the representing body hath all the power, strength, and privilege which the represented hath?  And suppose it hath all the legal power; yet it hath not all the natural, either of strength or wisdom, that the whole hath.  Now, because the representative hath power from the whole – and the main body can meet no other way – therefore the acts, laws, and decrees of the representative, be it ecclesiastical or civil, are binding in their strength; but they are not so certain and free from error as is that wisdom which resides in the whole. [Op. Cit. 252–3.]

      The laity are an active not a passive part of the church.  To Hooker, all power flows from the people to the prince.  If this be not admitted, I do not believe that it is ultimately possible to argue for our continuity.  It would be well if those among us who deny all active participation to the laity would ponder this.  Such a view has no logical stopping place short of the encyclical Pascendi – at least, it is not easy to see one.  It is peculiarly disastrous in a day like this when so much of the best work and thought for the church is done by laymen.  Laymen in our branch of the church, from one point of view, have too much influence, from another too little.  The parson’s freehold is responsible for much leakage and a wrong relation, and for a wrong temper in both.  It will be found that where the church is strongest it is where the parson’s freehold means least.  Lastly, and this is obvious, the Reformation, as it was effected in this country, cannot be defended except (a) a particular church has inherent rights – i.e., the group-life is real; (b) the abuses were real, and other efforts at remedy had been tried in vain.  This last is a question of fact.  Some persons with strong imagination may be able to hold a negative view.  No one who is aware of the facts summarised in Professor Whitney’s last lecture, or has read Creighton or Pastor, is likely to deny them, still less if he has read any of the original authorities.

      The disentanglement of the church from the state begins with the effective occupation secured by the Roman Catholics and the Nonconformist sects.  After the Toleration Act it becomes impossible to speak of church and nation as co-extensive.  (At least that is so of the church as an organised society.  During the eighteenth century I suppose that the vast majority of citizens were baptised members of the Catholic church, whatever sect they were to join later.)  The Act of Union with Scotland made a further difference in that it left what was now a single state under one parliament with two different established churches.  The non-juring schism was of capital influence, for it showed the possibility of strong church doctrine, apart from the national establishment.  Hence it is that the doctrine of the two societies began to be popular.  Developed by the Presbyterians, and held by Thorndike and Stillingfleet, it is a return to the primitive notion before the peace of the church under Constantine the Great.  We find the doctrine in Hickes the non-juror, who admits its likeness to the Presbyterian theory of the two kingdoms, and also in Beveridge.*  The two conceptions struggled together in the interesting Bangorian controversy of 1717.  Hoadley raised the question of the nature of the kingdom of Christ, and developed it on purely Erastian lines.  His opponents, among whom were Sherlock, his old comrade at St. Catherine’s College, and William Law, upheld in strong emphasis the doctrine of church authority.  Thee did not identify it with the civil power.  The following passage from Law’s third letter to the Bishop of Bangor is evidence of this:

      Does any one say that our obligation to be of the Church of England arises from any human authority, as such in England?  No, my lord, if human authority should not only desert the Church, but make the severest laws against it, yet we should be still under the same necessity of communicating with it; because that necessity is independent of human laws, is founded upon the authority of God, and constantly obliges in the same degree, be the laws of the State what they will. [Law, Three Letters, Works, i. 181.]

      *‘Your next objection against my Propositions is for containing a Doctrine so like that of the Presbyterians concerning Church Power, and Independency, by which they have endeavoured to enslave the State to the Church.

      ‘To which I answer, that there are few Sects that do not retain some Truths, one of which is the Distinction of Ecclesiastical and Civil Power, and the Independency of the Church on the State.’ – Hickes, The Dignity of the Episcopal Order, p. 93.

      ‘ Every man in a Christian Nation is in a different respect a member of both societies and yet to be subject to the laws of both.’ – Hickes, The Dignity of the Episcopal Order, p. 37.

A little later Warburton, in his book on ‘The Alliance between Church and State,’ stated definitely the doctrine that church and state are two distinct corporate personalities – distinct because, although composed of precisely the same persons, they are formed for different ends and governed by a different set of officers.  Warburton admitted toleration, but he would not allow full rights of citizenship to the Nonconformists.  Mr. Gladstone’s book in the nineteenth century was a harking back to the older, the medieval or seventeenth century, ideal of the church.  The process of modern development has made that impossible.  Nothing legally prevents England from being governed by a Cabinet of Quakers, a House of Lords (with one exception besides the bishops) all Roman Catholics, and a House of Commons all agnostics.  With the rise into entire liberty of all religious bodies, the notion of the church as co-extensive with the nation has vanished – although it still lingers in some of the forms of undenominationalism.  Erastianism so-called has changed its significance – it means no longer the control of the clerical by the lay elements within the same religious society – it means, or may mean, the control of a religious society by outside persons, who may reject its creeds and attack its ethical foundations.  Persons who favour the modern forms of state interference with the church may think that they are following the Erastians of the Long Parliament or Queen Elizabeth’s Puritan counsellors like Walsingham.  In truth, they are in a position which differs tote caelo from that of even the most Erastian German prince of the sixteenth century, except in so far as they worship power irrespective of its moral direction.

      But there is a further difference.  The church of England is still nominally established; but it cannot be said to be the established church of the Empire.  If we take the United Kingdom, it has no established church.  If we take the Empire as a whole as a single unit, it is still less true to speak of the church of England as the official form of Christianity.  Thus it appears that if we are to talk in any real sense of the national church we cannot do so on the old ground of religious uniformity, nor can we do so on the newer ground of its being the established as distinguished from the non-established religion, for it is not that save in a very small portion of the Empire, and in only one portion of the area under the immediate control of Westminster.  But neither can we say that it is the most conspicuous Christian society in Angle-Saxon civilisation, and that it is the duty of everyone who has any sense of religious order to submit himself to its discipline.  Whatever may be the racial mixture in the United States of America, it remains true that their institutions are of the English type; that their law is English, not Roman; and that their language, even in their advertisements, bears more resemblance to English than to anything else.  Yet can anyone say that the old territorial doctrine of the church holds there; and that an Italian, an Englishman, a Greek, and an Armenian Christian who arrived with their families, as immigrants into New York, are bound as a matter of duty to join the American episcopal church and to bring their children up therein?  It is true that the greatest hopes for that church are this gradual assimilation of members of the Eastern churches, who do not want to be Romans and to have no affinity with Protestantism; and it is a consummation for which we should all pray that this opportunity may be realised by the leaders, and that interesting body be widened in its interests and less dependent on a certain historical sentiment.  The seventeenth century is all very well, and I would that I might hear the living voice of Jeremy Taylor; but we have to live in the twentieth, and to look towards those that come after.  Thus it appears that all the old foundations of national churches have broken down.  It may be said that we do not want them; the English church is based on ‘sound learning’ as Creighton said, on Scripture and the Fathers as the Carolines said; and other churches when they differ from her do so at their peril.  That may be true.  But the prospect of converting the world to Anglicanism seems a little remote, when all we know is that we have failed to convert to it half the English people.

      Is there no foundation for loyalty to the national church?  Has it ceased to have all meaning to us?  Many even among its members would say that that is so.  Held together by the bond of state establishment, parties in the church of England know one another only through mutual hostility.  Its members have no unity, and can only look for their inspiration either to some revelation of individual religion or to some larger body; while to talk of the mind of the church of England is to talk of an entity which is non-existent.  That is not the case.  There is a soul of the English, although individuals in very different degrees embody it.  There is a mind of England about the war, although certain people on the fringe may share it little or not at all.  So it may be in the church of England.  Only by the confusion of authority with infallibility is that fact ignored.  The cardinal difference between the conception of religions which roughly we call Protestant and those we call Catholic is a difference between an individualist and a communal notion of all religious life.  So erudite a Protestant as the late Dr. Fairbairn was never able, so far as I could see, to understand the force of the corporate appeal in religion.  Now, if we are resolved – and that is no question of discussion in these lectures – that the purely individualist notion of religion is untenable, it is obvious that we are Christians by belonging to some society; and that its authority over us, though not absolute, is decisive.  On the other hand, the cardinal objection to the papal theory is that its notion of authority is absolute, and that it concentrates all real power at the centre.  The contention of the conciliar divines, whom I discussed a fortnight ago, is the opposite of this; so is that of the classical upholders of the English church as reformed like Laud; and upholders of the Orthodox church like Khomiakoff, of whom Dr. Frere spoke.  These writers regard the Holy Spirit as working throughout the whole body, while even Romans like Bossuet and Febronius attach vast importance to the general consent of the faithful, by which the layman is given his place.  But the relation of the faithful to one another is not amorphous; it is organised in social units, each with a distinct though limited authority, and an inherent life.  Of these the most enduring and fundamental is the diocese.  Even the diocese, we may remember, was largely the following of civic arrangements, not the creation of the church.  The patriarchates arose through similar causes of aggregation.  So with national churches.  Mandell Creighton in his book ‘The National Church’ has tried to trace the growth of this.  The question is whether, so long as nations exist, that sense of communal authority on the one hand, and on the other of inherent life in the parts not merely derived power from the centre, is not best expressed and most effectively preserved by an organisation of the church with national units, like those of England, Russia, Greece, &c.  I see no reason to doubt this, provided all that complex of influences which flows from history, race, and local environment does operate to produce a definite national temperament.  Nor can I see any ground to doubt that God may have a word for a nation not as mere individual units, but as gathered into a religious society.  Some people seem to think that it is un-Christian to talk of national churches, because a nation is a natural unit.  If that is so, the arrangement of many a diocese, the seat of the bishop, the patriarchate, the province must be equally un-Christian.  They all followed civil lines.  Any unified group of men that is real may be the centre of a church.  The objection here raised, seems like saying that the church becomes degraded by dealing with human beings instead of angels.*  This truth is not altered by the fact that many members of the nation feel no such allegiance.  With religious liberty that is inevitable, for many will not be Christians or even Theists at all.  Nor must we forget that all the baptised are members of God’s church; and that the members of those unauthorised guilds we call the sects are not outside the church altogether, except on a theory which not even the Romans accept.  Further, such a national group within the vast church universal will be expected to make its own contribution, and must enjoy a relative independence.  Since the territorial theory has obviously broken down, there can be no reason why members of such a group should not have their own rites and their own language when resident in a foreign country.  The real question is whether such a national group has any true unity, and what is the true nature of religious authority?  On neither the papal nor the Protestant doctrine can this organisation be justified.  But I think that it can be upon the Catholic.

      *Zillich emphasises this national tendency in Febronius, which  he considers has not been sufficiently regarded.  ‘Er stimmt nicht der römischen Tendenz bei, in der Kirche alles zu uniformieren, sondern erkennt innerhalb der Kirche nationale Unterschiede der Sitten and Gebräuche an.’ – Cf. I, § 1, note 2.

      ‘Die Bistümer derselben Nation bilden ihm ein ideales Ganze, eine Einheit.’ – p. 31.

      But it must be Catholic.  The contribution of nationality to the church is a real one; that combination of liberty with order which is the distinct quality of the English, looks like anarchy to the autocrat, and like tyranny to the anarchist.  In the same way the English church presents to some of its members an almost unwarrantable intrusion on freedom of opinion and elasticity of organisation, while to others it is a chaos of warring elements, ‘a land without any order, and where the light is as darkness.’  It needs more patience and faith than the passionate-felt religion of the Pietist, more than the swept and garnished logical pagoda of the Roman.  But to those with eyes to see it has the promise of a noble future, and gifts to offer as well as to receive.  Some it must receive.  No insular pride will befit any defender of existing national churches.  The notion of absolute, independent entities must go.  The national group is real, with its own real life, but it is a group, a part.  The objection to Rome is not that she claims to be universal, but that she fails, and must fail; that ‘she is at best a particular church,’ as Bishop Hall says; that many of her peculiarities are local; that her spirit is essentially sectarian (setting up a part for the whole), and that the Latin mind is by no means the finest or most subtle, so that nearly all religious ideas undergo a certain coarsening when poured into that mould.  But if this objection be valid, we need to beware lest we make ourselves a prey to the same attack.  The vision of Rome has an undoubted attraction; it has the attraction of vastness, of splendour, of a supra-national quality, a real home of the soul of many ages, a shelter for the poor and suffering, a seed-plot of heroic virtue and multitudinous martyrdoms (even since she lost half Europe).  She has a long history, with no obvious breaks or catastrophic change.  In practice her theory of autocracy seems compatible with considerable developments of the communal idea, for since the facts of life are against them, no false theories do so much harm as they would if they were true.  Those in search of a voice speaking as the voice of God may seem to see it in the illustrious occupant of the apostolic see, and many people are not troubled about those questions involved in ultramontanism.  If we are to withstand the charm of this – a charm which I feel myself – we cannot hope to do so on a ground of absolute watertight, national churches.  ‘We must repent of Anglicanism no less than of Romanism,’ says Mr. Lacy in his illuminating lectures on Catholicity.  That sentiment is justified if we mean by Anglicanism this exclusive spirit, which refuses even to look beyond the seas, and alters ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ into ‘the dear old Church of England.’  We see before our eyes the evil of the claim to absolute independence of all human law and morals on the part of a state.  Equally dangerous is the claim to a similar independence on the part of any local church.  Such a claim was not made by most of the Carolines, nor even by Jewel.  They all felt the authority of the whole, and were persuaded that all the independence which they claimed was in matters of machinery, and that the real things were common.  They would not have dreamed, for instance, of claiming that a Christian might disbelieve in individual immortalitv.*

      *It is interesting to read the following expressions of the collegiate doctrine of the church in writers so widely separated.  Henry of Hesse at the close of the fourteenth century, Casaubon the Huguenot scholar who embraced the English church and held a prebend therein, Isaac Barrow, and Febronius.

      ‘Ratio dictitat, consuetudo frequentat, natura quibet, quod in omni Collegio, Communitate et Politia, sic sit quod emergente aliquo casu arduo et speciali, tangente Rempublicam, recurratur ad Concilium magnum illius Collegii rel.’ – Henry de Langenstein, Concilium (Pacis), printed in Dupin’s Gerson, ii. 825.

      ‘Upon this very account Romish pretence doth not well accord with holy Scripture, because it transformeth the Church into another kind of body than it was constituted by God, according to the representation of it in Scripture; for there it is represented as a spiritual and heavenly society compacted by the bands of one faith, one hope, one spirit of charity; but this pretence turneth it into a worldly frame; united by the same bands of interest and design; managed in the same manner by terror and allurement, supported by the same props of force, of policy, of wealth, of reputation and splendour, as all other secular corporations are.  You may call it what you please, but it is evident that in truth the papal monarch is a temporal dominion driving on worldly ends by worldly means.’ – Banrow, Treatise, p. 262.

      Naturale est Ecclesiae etiam ex instituto Christi coire in Corpus, seu Collegium; non ita in regnis Monarchicis (quorum paucissima habent Status) subditi cum Rege tanquam commembro et consodali suo Collegium faciunt, collegialiter deliberant statiunt et definiunt.  Quare ex communissimis omnis juris Collegialis notionibus ac regulis apte de Ecclesia tanquam corpore dicitur, quod major sint auctoritas Corporis quam cujusque membri, etiam primi.’ – Feb. i. 5, 21.

      ‘Romana igitur Ecclesia, Graeca, Antiochena, Aegyptia, Abyssina, Moschoortica, et plures aliae, membra sunt, doctrina quidem et fidei sinceritate multum praestantia alia aliis, sed tamen membra, Ecclesia Catholicae; cujus compages, quod ad formam exteriorem, dudum est soluta,’ p. 14.

      Isaac Casaubon, Ad Cardinalem Perronium; Epistola; De Fide et Unitate Ecclesiae Christianae (ed. Meyrick), 1875.

      Let us state our case then; but do not let us overstate it.  Let us not be afraid of every practice or gesture or litany, because it is Roman or Russian or Coptic; above all, let us not be afraid of variety.  Uniformity we think to be the curse of Rome; are there no reasons to suppose that some would make it the burden of Anglicanism?  Let us remember the words of Bingham:

      It was necessary that every Christian, when he came to a foreign Church, should readily comply with the innocent usages and customs of that Church, where he happened to be, though they might chance in some circumstances to differ from his own.  This was a necessary rule of peace to preserve the unity of communion and worship throughout the whole Catholic Church.  For it was impossible that every Church should have the same rites and ceremonies, the same customs and usages in all respects, or even the same method and manner of worship exactly agreeing in all punctilios with one another, unless there had been a general Liturgy for the whole Church expressly enjoined by Divine appointment.  It was enough that all Churches agreed in the substance of Divine worship; and for circumstantials, such as rites and ceremonies, method and order, and the like, every Church had liberty to judge and choose for herself by the rules of expediency and convenience; and then, as it was the duty of every member of any particular Church to comply with the innocent customs of his own Church, in order to hold free communion with her, so it was the duty of every Christian to comply with the different customs of all other Churches wherever he happened to travel, in order to hold communion with the Catholic Church in all places without exception. [Works, vi., p. 40.]

      Above all, let us not be tied to the past or afraid of new experiments.  The legalist spirit is the bane of true religion; and a stolid adherence to what has been merely because it has been is little better.  ‘All things are yours, whether things present or things to come,’ said St. Paul.  Even so strong a believer in tradition as Laud could say, ‘Tradition is but a lane in the Church; it hath an end not only to receive us in, but another after to let us out into more open and richer ground.’

VII – The Nineteenth Century

      A Century ends and begins every year; and yet there is something to be said for giving a special significance to the century that falls under our titular figure.  There are cycles and rhythms in human affairs; and they do happen to fall roughly under these heads.  So that a particular century acquires a mind, a group personality of its own.  At any rate, the nineteenth century can be so pitted against the eighteenth, and it would seem as if we already, in the twentieth, had passed into another atmosphere, from out of which we are looking back on the Victorian Age as on a strange world.

      I suppose that the period which gave to the nineteenth century its significant character lasted from 1830 to 1890.  It was during that spell of time that we launched out on the work of social reform and reconstruction, of industrial and scientific expansion, which is covered by the broad phrase.  Before 1830 we were still under the social reaction which followed the exhaustion of the war; and, for relief from our material depression, enjoyed a wonderful outburst of poetry, imagination, and romance in the literary world, which had nothing in it that was typical of the temper that dominated the subsequent industrial era.  Men were caught up into the world of magic and adventure, enthralled by the art of Walter Scott.  They shook with the rebel passion of Byron.  They found themselves looking out

‘through magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas,’

drawn thither by the delicate spirit of Keats.  With Coleridge and Wordsworth they saw the light

‘that never was on sea or land.’

They felt the sway of visionary things – the mystery of those strange

‘Fallings from us, vanishings

Blank misgivings of a creature,

      Moving about in worlds not realised.’

And all this had little to say to the plain and practical utilitarianism, the empirical mechanism, which were to stamp their brand upon the age.  It was the dauntless optimism of Jeremy Bentham, and the philosophy and political economy of the two Mills, which combined with the immense extension of commercialism to create the mind of the epoch – an epoch which was showing signs of coming to an end during the last ten years of the century.  By 1890 we were already aware of the mind and atmosphere in which we stand today.

      Now, granting this to be what we mean by the nineteenth century, we are to see how religion, as we Anglicans understand it, fared under these conditions.  How did it survive?  In what form did it emerge at the close of the day?

      Well, first, it was singularly unfortunate in its relation to the forces actually and creatively at work in constituting the social order that was typical of the century.  It stood apart from, and outside, them.  It had, indeed, taken form before they were fully in action.  It drew its inspiration from an earlier date.  Evangelicalism, for instance, sprang out of a vast pity for the poor who had suffered such misery under the industrial revolution.  It went down to them in compassion; it spent itself in discovering to them their soul, and in opening out to them its way of salvation.  This had been nobly done ever since the heroic days of Wesley.  But there was no talk yet of social reconstruction.  And when it came, the splendid devotion of Lord Shaftesbury could only hope to mitigate the cruelties and horrors that had accompanied the reconstruction.  His Factory Act signalised what would become, long after, a new leading social motive; but, for the time, it could only check the worst results.  It could not touch the temper which directed and controlled the causes.  Tractarianism, again, had drunk at the springs that had been opened to the imagination and the spirit in those wonderful years before reform and Lord Brougham got into play.  Keble recorded, in his famous epitaph on Wordsworth, how much we owed to that high prophetic spirit, raised up by God in perilous times, to reassert the ancient sanctities of the soul.  Walter Scott had kindled the delight in the old gallantry of the medieval life, which now spent itself in restoring the glories of historic shrines.  Romance had filled the earth once more with the splendour of vivid colour, and with the joy of intense dramatic passion; and this new sensitiveness found expression in the keen desire for the beauty of worship, and for the full freedom of the imagination in the life of religion.  The new sense of symbolism and mystery, led by Coleridge, took form in the craving for sacramental expression, and in the new ardour for mystical union and illumination.  All this was already astir in the blood of those who had awoken to the call of the Spirit; and the secular movement, therefore, which took matters in hand and set itself to reshape the world, had little enough in common with the forces at work in the religious revival.  It looked another way; it drew on other sources; it had a different mind.  For it, such inspirations as these were repellent nonsense.  It had business of quite another type on hand.  And this natural repugnancy to the new forms and fashions which religion was taking led it to emphasise its intellectual exclusiveness and its own self-sufficiency.  It loudly proclaimed its power to think for itself, and to manage its own affairs in its own way.  It needed no cooperation from such an alien world as this.  Secular interests were the sole determinants of secular affairs.  Business was business; and it could only suffer confusion by the intervention of alien religious motives.  The ethics of trade had not been considered in the Sermon on the Mount.  There were economic laws which worked out their own conclusions; and it was at once foolish and dangerous to attempt to contravene them.  So religion was warned off the ground by the philosophy which had undertaken the work of social reconstruction.  And the warning was backed by the entire accumulated authority of the intellectuals of the day.  Strong in their new economic science, with a confident optimism that had had no experience as yet of its inevitable limitations, they held the field; they occupied the seats of the mighty.  Only one tempestuous voice was heard in clamorous protest.  Carlyle spoke with the passionate vehemence of one who felt himself to be crying in the wilderness.  But his utterance was not easy for the church to understand as that of a friend.  So it knew not what to say.  It let itself be overcrowed by the arrogant intellectualism of the economists.  It fell back on its own special business, and ringed itself round within the circle of its own immediate interests.  It did this, perhaps, with all the more zeal and passion because of its exclusion from the busy work that was going forward all round it.

      But, whatever the effect on its own inherent activity, it had lost its chance of directing and inspiring the dominant factors which were engaged in creating the new England.  It might be aghast at the sight of the hideous slum cities that were spreading their dismal horror over the fair spaces of our sweet countrysides.  It might protest against manifest crimes, such as the sweating and killing of women and children in the pestilential factories of the North.  It could ease, and palliate, and relieve.  It could do something to take the sharp edge off the mechanism of an iron Poor Law.  But it was powerless to get at the heart of the matter.  It exercised no control over the formative powers which were building up the industrial system.  It had no place within the conscience which was dictating to commerce the ethics under which its work was to be done.  It lay outside the abstract economic will which had set itself to the task of isolating its own special department, and of handling it according to the moral standard which its own peculiar expediences demanded.  It had to watch on, as an uncomfortable and helpless spectator, while the vast bulk of the national life organised itself for action on lines wholly independent of the religious outlook and interest, at variance with the mind of Christ, incapable of reconciliation with the spirit of human brotherhood.  More and more every year industrialism dominated the entire scene.  It bulked ever larger, as the characteristic of the century.  Society took its colour and type and tone from it.  The older tradition yielded place to it.  Its temper, its need, its style, its interest, its quality, possessed and pervaded our national existence.  And, moreover, this industrialism that had taken such rooted possession of England’s mind was all based on principles of competitive individualism, with which the idea of a church, a Christian society, knit into one body by one Spirit, was utterly at variance.  This was the supreme disaster which overshadowed the whole period.  One brave little band, created by the prophetic force of Maurice and heralded by the brilliant polemic of Charles Kingsley, made an effort to break the weight of scientific authority, which was insisting on a free secular and economic development of industrial society under the conditions of an isolated play of competitive individual interests.  But, though it left behind it good seed that was to bear much fruit in days when men had learnt wisdom by bitter experience, for the moment it failed to stave off the accepted divorce between the spiritual and secular worlds.  The secular chiefs thundered and threatened; and the church, in reluctant dismay, withdrew.  By this enforced and unhappy withdrawal it found itself tangled for the whole century in a narrow and curtailed opportunity.  The big world of affairs was going its own way without it.  The enormous social structure that grew up under these years of amazing expansion was not of its making.  It moved under alien impulses towards ends that it could not justify.  Religion was driven into corners where it could carry on its own business to itself, on its own lines, governed by its own sanctions.

      And this it did with a fervour that was, perhaps, heightened by its very isolation from outside secular interests.  Its impulse was sincere and strong.  The flame of its devotion burned keenly.  There was a consuming love of souls, a great pity, a heartfelt charity, a noble spirit of self-sacrifice, a rich inspiration, a splendid confidence in the Fatherhood of God, and in the power of redeeming love put out in Jesus Christ.  The whole Catholic creed had become alive to thousands upon thousands of men and women, who desired nothing better than to convey to the poor and the suffering and the foolish their own sense of the peace and joy that had come to them through the transfiguring efficacy of pardon and grace.  So a wonderful passion was thrown into the evangelical work of the church; and the altars were thronged with worshippers; and there were missions and retreats, and spiritual conferences; and everywhere the powers of the kingdom were pressing forward to take up the new ground.  It was a wonderful time.  Hearts were uplifted.  Houses of God were everywhere made glorious in the beauty of holiness.  Knots of priests and of devoted women flung themselves into the thick of blind, desolate, crowded slums, and waged with lifelong courage the high warfare of Christ.

      That warfare was wholly spiritual; all the more, as I say, because of its abandonment of all hope of guiding the vast secular movement.  And its spirituality was yet more heightened by the fact that, in its passion to put out all the full power of the Kingdom in order to reach and touch the poor, it found itself fighting against the cramping limitations put upon it by its own traditional connexion with the state and the civil order of society.  If it was to do this new work under these new conditions with any hope of success, it must be free to adapt itself to the facts; it must be unhampered in the exercise of its spiritual capacities; it must be at liberty to draw on all its own inherent resources; it must be given full swing.  Yet, as soon as it began to exercise this larger liberty, it found itself pulled up tight by uniformities, and expediences, and diplomacies, which had governed the Elizabethan compromise.  An entirely new England had come into being – an England which that old balanced and complicated arrangement called ‘the Establishment’ had never for a moment contemplated.  Circumstances so utterly novel cried aloud for elasticity on the part of the church, which had to keep level with their crowded needs.  Human life had overflowed all the parochial framework within which it was supposed to lie.  It lay in helpless disorganised masses, which had lost all coherence.  The church could only overtake it by breaking up its ancient boundaries, and venturing on new and daring experiments.  Old endowments were huddled together in the wrong places; they were difficult to move or dislodge or distribute.  At the best, they were totally inadequate to meet the immense demands.  The things, therefore, to be done could only be done by voluntary effort, and voluntary effort was forthcoming.  It took endless shapes.  It threw itself out in innumerable ventures of faith, and everything helped to carry the work further and further away from all that was covered by ‘Establishment’.  The men and women who plunged themselves down into this or that slum did their job without being aware of what being ‘established’ meant.  The new district, the new church, the mission chapel, the new bishopric, the new endowments – all witnessed to the vitality and elasticity of voluntaryism.  The ardent workers, whose deep personal devotion had saved the day for the church, only became aware that establishment was still a fact by a clutch laid from behind on their busy endeavours.  To their dismay and indignation, they discovered that a Parliament which had long ceased to have any title to represent the spiritual laity of the church, had awoken to its long-forgotten powers, and was profoundly suspicious of the new activities.  A long-neglected Court of Appeal emerged out of some unsuspected abyss, and began to deliver hampering and perplexing and often contradictory judgments on their doings.  There were debates, and disputes, and angry quarrels.  Obsolete rules, the deposits of buried troubles, were called into play.  The rubrics, which had struggled to secure a minimum of order and decency amid the agonies of the Elizabethan settlement, were evoked in order to curtail the maximum of legitimate possibilities which the present necessity urgently cried out for.  The uniformity of worship, which had been the ideal by which the ancient situation was to be saved from ruin, was now a deadly policy to press, when the novel and manifold conditions demanded the utmost liberty of variation which loyalty would permit.  Yet Law was put out, interpreted rigidly according to the mind of a long-dead generation in a totally different environment, to repress and cramp and distract and pervert the living church of the day, as it sincerely and eagerly set itself to interpret its liturgy in the terms of the immediate stress.  So followed jars, and friction, and lawsuits, and imprisonments, and bad temper, and angry recriminations, and futile wranglings, and irritating cross-purposes, and legal fictions, and aggravated consciences, and illegitimate sophistries, and spiritual demoralisation, and a vast waste of power.  And all this represented what ‘Establishment’ signified.  This was the main sign of its existence.  These were the chief associations that it called up.  And if there was anything else which it symbolised, it lay in all the weight of dull and stupid conventions, which hung so heavily on the church’s movements, and loaded down her every effort under lumps of obstructive habit, and prohibitive precedent.

      Thus, the revived church life found itself, for all its fervour, fretted and humiliated by a State which suspected and traversed its high claims, and a world which simply denied and ignored them.  There was heat, light, strength, confidence, faith, at the centre.  The religion at work was absolutely assured of itself.  It believed passionately in the truth and verity of its cause.  Those men and women who ate the Bread of the new Life, and drank of its Chalice, knew that they were regenerate.  They tasted the power of the New Birth.  They were in possession of quickening experiences.  They loved their beautiful worship in the glorified shrines.  They adored their Master and King.  At the heart there was the freedom and the warmth of a known salvation.  But, all about and around it, was an environment that forbade it entry, and was antagonistic to its hopes, and ridiculed its aspirations, and thwarted its actions, and told against its reality.  So it struggled, painfully and confusedly, in a situation that refused to welcome it, and that seemed to make its professions inflated and absurd.  The state, to which it was intimately attached by immemorial ties, served only to throw doubt upon its spiritual authority.  The ever-growing world of real affairs, with its problems becoming ever more acute and intense, went on its own way without the slightest concern in the church’s system, or ethics, or even existence.

      What was the result?  The good result, first, was, as I have already suggested, that the church was forced back on her own pure spiritual validities.  Only in herself could she find the resources on which to rely.  External supports were less and less to be counted upon.  The church, which had been habituated by the experience of centuries to trust to accidents of position and to social and civil influences for her authority, had to learn that these might all be against her, and that she was lost unless she would trust in her own inherent reality.  She must believe in the inward light; in the authentic verdict of her corporate belief; in the word of her Lord; in the power of the Spirit.  She must go forward in the strength of her own conviction, and she must assert her claim as assured and sufficing, in spite of all outside fact that told against it.  This was an immense gain which the situation forced upon her.  She was back on the bedrock.

      Moreover, this independence of state support has been immensely reinforced by the wide expansion of the churches in communion with the home church throughout the Colonies and Dominions, as well as outside the frontiers of our Empire.  Our missionary work has, indeed, been pitiably below the standard required of us by our national obligations; but, at least, we have spread our lines everywhere, over the whole face of our earth, however thinly we have filled them up.  And, everywhere, it has been done entirely by voluntary effort.  Only in certain old Indian bishoprics and chaplaincies does any State connexion still remain.  It has been withdrawn over the whole area of the Colonies.  It has never been asked for in the new regions of extension.  Thus, in close touch with Canterbury, and drawn together by ever closer ties through each recurrent Pan-Anglican conference, there is, now, a numerous and varied body of federated churches, acting together with the home church, in absolute freedom from all the hampering conditions which establishment imposes.  This has supplied an excellent training in spiritual liberty and self-sufficiency.

      But, then, is it possible to make strong assertions which fail to verify themselves in the environing facts?  Can claims be pitched so high if the outside conditions refuse to conform to them?  Can you go on believing in a revelation which is clouded and obscured and traversed, and even denied, by the whole array of visible and tangible circumstance?  Can a position be sound which is capable of being so acutely suspected, and doubted, and contradicted, and ignored?  Can this be the church of God, beautiful as an army with banners, when its advent is only greeted with shouts of laughter and derision?  Can God’s holy work go forward in so troubled and confused a medley, with such disconcerting blunders, amid such disfiguring surroundings, winning so poor a recognition, blocked by such dismal refusals, and by such stupid ignorance of all that is happening?  That was the perpetual dilemma that haunted the whole movement.  But it was met by a discipline and a temper which were eminently characteristic both of the period and of the Anglican mind.  First, we had begun to take measure of the reality of church history.  Hitherto, it had been a mere fancy world, out of which human flesh and blood had vanished.  It moved like clockwork.  The church had appeared as if she had never hesitated or stumbled, or been in difficulties.  Whenever a heretic arose, she knew him at once for the heretic he was; and called a council, and disposed of him.  Church order was the known and inevitable thing, which apostles had created at a stroke and bishops had transmitted.  Everything was there from the beginning; and the true believer had his authoritative and authentic creed always to hand.  It was his own fault if he did not know it exactly and clearly.  So the old textbook had pictured it.  But, now, we all knew better.  Our eyes were open to the actual drama, and the scene disclosed was strangely familiar.  We read our Acts, and saw real men and women in action, and felt our hearts beat with their anxieties, and trembled at each crisis that threatened disaster.  Here were Apostles in doubt; torn this way and that by counter motives; unable to foresee what would be their ultimate decision; dealing with emergencies as they arose; falling back on tentative compromises; venturing on uncertain experiments; discussing, disputing, even quarrelling; painfully working out their problems.  And the questions before them were burning; and the issues vital.  They concerned the very central matters of faith.  Yet the guidance had to be won by effort and struggle, at serious risk, and often at bitter cost.  So the church had begun, even while it was under the hands of those who had seen and touched and heard the living Lord.  And always the same story repeated itself.  For four centuries the church shook under the stormy debate over the personality of Him whom it adored.  The very core of the creed was at stake.  How were believers to define their belief?  Councils met, and contradicted one another.  Bishops were swept this way and that.  The struggle rose and fell.  Here was an opportunity, surely, when if there had been a clear and decisive method of determining so tremendous an issue by a central recognised infallible authority, it was bound to declare itself.  Yet nothing of the kind happens.  There is no quick and easy method; no penny-in-the-slot security for arriving at the result; no short cut; no royal road.  It had to be laboriously fought out.  Now and again it looked as if the final Truth must have gone under.  It hung on one man’s life, and he in exile from his church.  No one could say which way the long strife would end.  At last the work of the Holy Spirit made itself slowly felt; and the word is spoken; and the worn and weary church took breath before it fell under the stress of the next great critical decision.

      That was real history, and how ludicrously inept appeared the cut-and-dry schemes, the cast-iron formula, the dogmatic simplicities, which had done duty for it in the books!  How strangely remote and unreal was the picture that papalism offered of the nature and habits of the church!  How wildly unlike the reality!  How puerile, how futile, its facile account of a universal jurisdiction committed by Christ to St. Peter’s successor in his chair at Rome!  The church’s story was, at any rate, of a different caste and quality from anything pictured by that easy formula.  The turbulent and insurgent facts tell an altogether different tale.  And as we followed along its thrilling adventures, its doubtful moments, its awful risks, we recognised something of our own story in it.  This weird, tumbled Anglican tale was not altogether false to type.  It was but a sample of the great tradition.  Always the same scene presented itself of a strong light at the centre, where the high worship held its seat, while round and about it there was the toil and moil of a profound distress, of a deep uncertainty, of a perilous and confused debate.  We were but taking up our heritage, as we, in England, passed from crisis to crisis, and ever it looked as if the ship might break and sink, and no one could say the clear word that was wanted, and all our splendid claims were countered by adverse denials, and often we hardly knew which were our friends and which were our foes.

      We need not then be afraid to belong to a church in difficulties, a church under a cloud, a church distracted, a church that was ignorant of the road it had to tread.  This all belongs to the normal plight in which the church of God works out its destiny.  So Dean Church describes the mind of those who came through the shock of Newman’s going.  The words are well known, but they cannot be too often recalled.  He speaks of the principle which, in the long run, gave them hope and energy:

      It was not the revival of the old Via Media, it was not the assertion of the superiority of the English Church, it was not the proposal of a new theory of the Church and its functions.  It was the resolute and serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic and impressive eloquence to reality and experience, as well as to history, as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the English Church, shown not on paper but in work, and in spite of contradictory appearances and inconsistent elements.  The English Church was, after all, as well worth fighting for as any other.  It was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching and in life, were largely intermingled, and the mixture had to be largely allowed for.  We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and incomplete one.  Patiently to do our best, for it was better than leaving it to its fate.  In these days of stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a School, whose main purpose was to see things as they are, which had learned by experience to distrust unqualified admiration and unqualified disparagement, not afraid to honour all that is great and beneficent in Rome, not afraid, with English frankness, to criticise freely at home, but not to be won over, in one case, by the good things, to condone and accept the bad; and not deterred, in the other, from service, from love, from self-sacrifice, by the presence of much to regret and to resist. [Church, Oxford Movement, pp. 346–347; or pp. 401–402 in the Eversley edition.]

Thus our new insight into history helped.  It enabled us to understand with what downright reality God had entered into our flesh and blood on the historical plane, and the method on which He had continually worked there.  We saw that our choice was to be made, not between Ideal and Ideal, still less between the Roman Ideal and the Anglican Ideal, but between Real and Real.  We had not to determine what ought to be or have been; but we were concerned entirely with what had been, with what God had allowed to be.  Once allow that, and we knew where we stood.

      And then, as we wondered at the roughness and insecurity with which He consented to work, there came along a poet of splendid power, who devoted his gifts to the unravelling of this very problem.  Throughout the whole period which is here taken as expressive of the nineteenth century, Robert Browning was asking himself why God’s ways were not more clear-cut, more decisive, more obvious to the plain man.  ‘Why is it so very hard to be a Christian?’  Hard, he meant, not merely to obey Christ’s Law; that hardness is perfectly intelligible; it ought to be very hard to do what Christ commands.  But why is it hard to know what Christianity is, what it really asks, what it means to believe it, and why it should be believed?  Why should there be any question about it?  Why is its light encompassed about with so much that is dark?  Why is the Christian’s task made so difficult for him to understand?  How can there be a revelation, which nevertheless appears to give so insecure an account of itself?  So he asked, so he wrestled; and his answer was that life is love, and love is motion.  Man is to move through God’s works to love of God Himself.  His peril is that he should stop short by the way, satisfied and arrested in the works, and not passing through to God.  Man is the pilgrim of never-resting love.  Therefore his one final sin is to stop.  That judges him.  At all costs he must be warned, hounded, hunted out of any resting place where he is tempted to stay.  Therefore it is that things are never made easy and comfortable for him.  Whatever position of security he reaches becomes at once his danger.  The life of love and of faith must be a venture, a risk, an act of daring.  There cannot be absolute certainty, independent of what the man himself brings to the decision.  For a man is being proved to see what he will hazard for love, and how far he is ready to fling himself out upon the heart of God.  He must take the risk.  He must bear the buffets.  The next step to be taken must always have its doubts.  The man has the light about his feet; it is sufficient to challenge him to trust it; but around him is still the encircling night, and what perils it holds in its folds he cannot say.  So, under challenge, under provocation, he moves out on his hazardous way – content if only he be not set aside, arrested and tamed and satisfied, in earth’s comfortable paddock.

Be all the earth a wilderness!

Only let me go on, go on,

Still hoping ever and anon

To reach one eve the Better Land!

.           .           .           .           .

And so I live, you see.

Go through the world, try, prove, reject,

Prefer; still struggling to effect

My warfare; happy that I can

Be crossed and thwarted as a man,

Not left in God’s contempt apart,

With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart,

Tame in earth’s paddock as her prize.

.           .           .           .           .

Thank God, no paradise stands barred

To entry, and É find it hard

To be a Christian.

                        – ‘Christmas Eve and Easter Day,’ xxxi., xxxiii.

This was the poet’s theme in poem after poem.  Thus, in the ‘Death in the Desert,’ he showed us the old Apostle, who had solved the doubts of his own generation, foreseeing ever new questionings, problems, perplexities, that would shake men out of their lethargy, and challenge them to the old hazardous ventures of faith.  So, again, in the magnificent vision of the pope, in ‘The Ring and the Book,’ the old man perceives why God thinks it well that as soon as man has ringed himself round with easy security in a protected city, some earthquake should cast all his defences flat, that he may recover his true manhood in the act by which he faces once more the wild beasts of the jungle, stripped bare of all but his own naked courage:

What if it be the mission of the age to shake

The torpor of assurance from our creed,

Re-introduce the doubt discarded? bring

The formidable danger back, we drove

Long ago to the distance and the dark?

We have built wall, and sleep in city safe:

But if some earthquake try the towers that laugh

To think they once saw Lions rule outside,

Man will stand out again, pale, resolute,

Prepared to die – that is, alive at last!

            The Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book,’ lines 1852–1863.

      Probation.  That was the poet’s keyword.  Life is a judgment.  And the judgment works through the hazard of decisions, taken under challenge of hard, and dark, and perilous experiences.  Religion is not given to make life easy, but difficult; not to make us comfortable and secure, but uncomfortable and insecure; not to enclose us in a tame paddock, but to impel us to keep ever pressing forward on our pilgrimage towards the Land that is very far off.  This teaching of our poet slowly filtered into our very being.  It passed into the substantial thought of two generations.  And whatever minor qualifications we might put upon it, it at least made all cut-and-dried schemes of life, all clockwork ideals, appear yet more remote from real facts than ever.  We understood how there might be a true revelation from God, which, nevertheless, spared us no trouble and made life harder, rather than easier, to understand.

      Probation.  After all it was a familiar word.  It brought to mind the deepest teacher ever given to our church – a teacher typical of the Anglican tradition and of the English temper – Bishop Butler.  He too, like Browning, saw that if the real significance of human life lay in moral probation, then probabilities must play a large part in it.  And by this rather unhappy word he meant that certainty was only possible through the active cooperation of the receiving mind.  The evidence, the proof, the arguments, the external authorities, were only the materials out of which the inner conviction could be formed.  Until taken up and fused by the initiative of the judgment, assenting, assimilating, cohering, they could only attain to ‘probability.’  The spark of living fire by which they were raised into a positive act of certainty comes from the man himself.  It is his contribution, quickened in him by the inner Divine Spirit, with the heat of his personal love.  The man himself is part of the conclusion.  His own spontaneity enters into it.  The decision arrived at, the conviction formed, includes a conative effort, an energy of his will in selecting and asserting.  Such an energy of will must have moral quality; and that is why the man himself is judged by the decision at which he arrives.  It depends on his ethical action how far the external probability will be transmitted into a spiritual certainty.

      So the great bishop taught us.  Not, indeed, that we read him much again.  He has been shamefully neglected.  But Browning served to bring us back into the bishop’s mind, and we found ourselves, practically, reading life under his terms and categories.  And, so reading, we could retain our hold on a strong, positive, unshaken belief in the fullness of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet be prepared to find this revelation pushing its anxious way along in the toil and trouble of perilous days, girdled by a confused hubbub of questions which it does not enable us to answer, loyal to the special task of giving us the help and strength that our souls need for their salvation, and leaving us to discover how its redemptive powers can be brought to bear upon this historic human life of ours.  Such a revelation acts as a perpetual challenge to our faith.  It is there to compel us to say and to show whether we will trust its light in the dark.  It will only verify itself to those who have the moral heart to trust it; and the proof will be given in the act that follows the trust.  Obviously, such a verification cannot take the precise form of a mathematical cube; rather, it realises its efficacy in a living process.  And the process is continuous.  The proof is not given, once for all, in a syllogism, but is for ever unrolling itself in the power that comes by trust.  This trust is corporate, and constitutes the abiding life of a believing body.  But each member of the body has to contribute his own vital energy to the corporate trust; and so, for each individual judgment, there must be a venture by which it takes up the proofs offered it, and vitalises them into a decisive conviction.  So alone is it judged.  Thus the strong and full belief in a distinct revelation of God Incarnate is consistent with the actual disturbed and incoherent environment through which it moves.  It moves.  For it is alive.  It is dynamic, not static.  The revelation goes forward, continually and continuously amassing its storied vindication of this truth.  It moves ever forward through the night.  It must be strong, or else it would not be able to push back the darkness into which it is ever advancing.  There must be no whittling down of the central creed.  The light must be powerful enough to give confidence, and to face the menacing obstructions.  And yet its very strength may often seem to intensify the darkness ahead, and the contrast between what we believe and what we cannot explain may grow greater rather than less.  For revelation is not given for the purpose of removing the difficulties that beset the natural man.  On the contrary, it creates more difficulties than it removes.  And it can afford to do so, because it enters in response to a natural belief that has seen its way to believe, in spite of the difficulties.  Such a faith, robust and genuine, has found the evidence, offered under natural conditions, sufficient for it to transmute into conviction; and such transmutation of proof into certainty, of evidence into conviction, involves always, as we have said, the personal equation – the energy of the living man.  And now, the same capacity for transfiguring the materials offered in proof is invited, by revelation, to come into play on a higher plane, in a new environment, in which it can exercise its powers upon finer experiences.  But this higher plane has a wider outlook, and, therefore, it may well be that here, more than ever, the unknown bulks yet larger than the known, and that a new swarm of questions springs into being which cannot be answered.  Do you recoil?  Revelation only asks in reply: ‘If you were not frightened before by difficulties in Nature, why are you frightened now?  You saw your way, in spite of them, before: you will see it again, if you will walk by what you know, and not be alarmed at what you don’t know.  You are rewarded for your faithfulness in the lower sphere of nature by being invited to exercise it yet further.  But there will always be the menace, risk, the suggestion of doubt, the shrinkings of ignorance, the evil whisper, “What if it be not true?”  You have already proved how your courage in faith can come through such trouble as this.  You have clung to what you saw to be true.  By so holding on you were proved, manifested, judged.  And now that judgment is to be continued on the higher plane of revelation.  It can never come to a close on this side of the final judgment.  You still must take your risk.  No one can avoid it.  Even the man who gives himself over absolutely to an external authority for his faith does it on the strength of a private and adventurous and perilous judgment of his own, that the authority to which he commits his soul is sufficient.  And this perilous act can never be left behind.  It is never done and over.  For still everything that follows from it depends upon it.  The authority to which a man bows must always have at its back that primal individual consent.  So the risk and peril involved in it at the first go on with it to the end.  No faith can escape from this note of venture.  It must always take its risks.  They are essential to its existence.’

      No doubt Browning, in driving home this truth, took it in an exaggerated individualistic form.  Each soul could only answer, as he thought, for its own religious experience.  But, in reality, the truth, once recognised, cries out for a church.  For no individual and isolated experience could bear the strain of the great adventure.  Its own orbit is too narrow; its own private and personal evidence too frail and intermittent.  The experience that is to stand down the long years that divide us from the facts in which Christ manifested His redemptive power towards us must be continuous, collective, manifold, corporate, enduring.  Our witness must find itself enclosed by a great cloud of witnesses, if it is to face and survive the shocks that menace its existence or the doubts that sweep up against it like a flood.  This victorious witness, that wins its way in spite of distress and tribulation, cannot be summed up in a single life, or be covered by one individual soul.  The challenge of the central light, as it moves on its way through time, repelling the threatening dark that is ever enveloping it, can only be delivered by a believing Body, massive, concerted, catholic, carrying along with it as it goes the momentum and the heritage of an unbroken existence.  Nothing short of this will suffice.  The individual believer will only come to his own within the authoritative impulse of a mighty and age-long fellowship – the unifying fellowship of all those who have made the venture of faith, and taken the risk, and not in vain.  The necessity for one holy Catholic church, therefore, is being more urgently felt in our day than ever.  On every side the severed communities are making earnest and pathetic efforts to recover it.  It is our great strength at this hour that, in spite of woeful losses, we, in this church of England, have at least retained enough to give to this ideal substantial reality.  Thank God, the structural witness is still ours.  We are learning the peculiar significance and value of the traditional form in which it has been historically expressed.  We cannot let it go, just when the demand for it is becoming more urgent every day.

      But this belief in the Catholic church still is consistent with the strange hubbub and confusion with which it is compassed about.  Just as with revelation, so with the church, it is ‘hard to be a Christian.’  Always, the menace and the peril will be there; and only by going forward in spite of them are they overcome.  Gradual experience alone verifies the recurrent victory.  The traditional image of the church will still be found in the moon, that, by reflection, testifies to her hidden source of light; but it will be Browning’s moon – that moon which he pictured travelling through a sky covered by scurrying clouds in banked masses.  Ever, as they near the moon, their mass darkens and blackens, as if they would inevitably blot it out.  Yet ever, as the clean, clear edge touches them, it eats its way into them; it forces its way through them; it fills them with its illumination; it survives them, and sails out once again into the open heaven, undimmed and free.  That is the story of the church of God, which we follow down the Ages with a faith that grows the stronger through the very dangers that have all but overwhelmed, and the very fears that have belied themselves.

      It is under this kind of discipline that we, in our own national church at home, have passed through the intellectual crisis which belonged to that anxious century in which the amazing revelation of the new science and history, and criticism, all but carried us all off our feet.  Never before had so much strange knowledge burst in at such speed.  Never before had so much that was habitual been forced to suffer such swift reversal.  No wonder that we staggered under the strain.  No wonder that, again and again, we trembled for the very bedrock on which we stood.

      How were we to come through?  There were in the early days various attempts made in the direction of an appeal to the law to repress and to decide.  One such effort proved singularly successful.  The prosecution of Mr. Voysey settled decisively that a Socinian interpretation of Christ invalidated for holding a cure.  This was never challenged again.  But other efforts only increased confusion.  The protest against the nomination of Dr. Hampden to a bishopric ended ineffectually.  And the prosecution of ‘Essays and Reviews’ brought us up dead against the problem of the Court of Appeal.  That enigmatical Court, constituted by chance, was utterly without the authority that was essential to give weight to its decisions in matters of faith.  The way of Law and Repression was thus blocked for those especially who held most strongly the authoritative rights of the church to speak on such dogmatic issues.  And we fell back, perforce, on the purgative methods of open debate.  This was not due to a deliberate choice.  Owing to the accident of the Court of Appeal being out of gear, there was really no alternative.  But perhaps now, looking back on our troubled passage, and comparing its results with the piteous wreckage that has accompanied the counter method of repression as it has been brought to bear by Rome on its modernist priests, we can better afford to put up with all the tangles and disturbances and perplexities which are inevitably involved in our own way of treating the crisis by loose, public, irregular debate.  The cruel and stupid mishandling of Cardinal Newman by the Curia, the distressing disclosures made in the autobiographies of Loisy and Tyrrell are but samples of what has happened but too often in France and Italy.  These records have all left a very dismal impression.  Here in England one great heroic Roman Catholic layman holds on a precarious way, and profoundly influences our religious and philosophical thinking.  It is difficult to exaggerate our intellectual debt to Baron F. von Hügel.  But the priesthood on which the repression tells is sadly sterilised, and from it, at present here in England, we get hardly any contribution to our critical and speculative problems.  There is a singular dearth of men of distinction.  Oddly enough, the supreme weapon that authority had forged for itself is kept studiously idle, in spite of all the obvious opportunities offered for its exercise.  There can hardly have ever been a time in which intellectual and moral disturbance more strenuously demanded the help of an infallible Judgment than the forty-five years that have elapsed since the Vatican Council of 1870.  Yet not once in all the troubles has the Infallible Voice actually spoken.

      On our own side there have been very bad spells of alarm.  We have laid ourselves open to jeers and laughter.  The medley of voices has often been ludicrous.  The spokesmen and pastors of the church have been timid and impotent at critical junctures.  There have been compromises and diplomacies which have discredited the very principle of authority.  We have little to congratulate ourselves upon in the way of nerve or courage.  Yet, after all, free debate, in spite of its surface follies, is found to have an unanticipated antiseptic efficacy.  Out of the babel conclusions slowly emerge; extravagances get disposed of; blunders are corrected; a balance is reached; rash criticisms exhibit their weaknesses; suspicions are dismissed; fallacies expose themselves; statements acquire their proper qualifications.  We take in; we give out; we modify; we arrive.  So, to our relief and amazement, the rough-and-ready process justifies itself; and we find ourselves in stronger possession of our Creed than, at this or that evil moment, we could have thought possible.  There is a truth which works itself out.  And just when we thought it would break, it stands.  If anyone asks whether this can be a revelation from God which manifests itself under such disturbing conditions, then we ask ourselves again our former question: ‘Is our lot harder than theirs who, during the apostolic years, on a vital matter like the authority of the old Jewish law, found themselves flung to and fro for years in the uncertainties of that prolonged debate between the passionate logic of St. Paul, and the searching appeals to precedent made by those who came from James, the Lord’s brother?  Are we worse off than those perplexed believers whose troubles Vincent de Lerins has so vividly portrayed, as they heard of bishop contradicting bishop, and council reversing council, and knew not where to find for certain the authority that could reassure them on the very central question of the cardinal creed?’

      After all, whatever the legitimate forms through which the authority of the church should find expression, it is the whole body of believers who have, finally, to determine the decision for themselves.  For the judgment of the strongest council has to win its way to ratification by gaining general assent.  There is no easy royal road by which to arrive at ultimate certainty in disputed verities.  It involves bitter travail of soul.  And we will not be afraid to go through the pains that our fathers bore before us.

      But, if this is so, then it is of vital importance that we should consciously recognise what is involved.  The process of working out a truth under the conditions of a general debate by all its members may conceivably be justified, but only on the condition that membership in the Body be a reality.  The members must be aware of their responsibilities, and prepared to discharge them.  For the strain of such a debate is very serious; and it can only work out its results if all play their part.  It cannot be left to itself, as if it were a mechanical process.  It will not arrive at its conclusion without our living concern.  Any such policy of laissez-faire, any such limp opportunism, would stultify our whole position.  For what is supposed is that the debate is carried on by the living Body, within its own atmosphere, on its own assumptions, under the stimulating energy of the Holy Spirit.  The debate is not academic or impersonal.  It is a challenge addressed to the believing Body, calling upon it to declare its permanent mind, its enduring judgment, on some point in its own authentic creed.  Only if the Body has a real mind, and a vital judgment to deliver, can it face the sifting challenge.  And, in order to disclose the mind, and to deliver the judgment, it must be in possession of itself; it must have the means and methods essential to a true delivery; it must be alive therefore to what is asked of it; it must have a constructive and coherent organic consciousness, by which to react under the critical pressure, so as to retain its own identity.  Without this, it will be pulverised under the weight of the invading forces.  And, above all, it must be sure of its own claims and capacities and endowments, with which it is empowered by the Spirit to meet each crisis.  Those of old, in Apostolic or Patristic days, of whose agonies and confusion we have spoken, came through the hubbub and distress alive, because they never doubted, in the midst of the tumult, that they were the Church of God, in possession of the secret of Eternal Life, members in the Body of Christ, who must be able, under the Hand of the Spirit, to say, at last, what it was that they believed.  Holding this fast, they could endure, in patience, the long and troubled night before the dawn broke.  The church can afford the strain of dispute within it, if it is certain that it is the church, and therefore possesses the temper and the qualities and the means by which to take the right measure of the discussion.  That is the difficulty in the case of a church like ours, which, just by being national and traditional and historic, has blurred its clear outlines, and has become identified with so much material that is, in no sense, its own, and is charged with the nominal membership of those multitudes who are passed down to it by circumstance and habit, and who have no idea of what membership entails, and never dream of undertaking its responsibilities.  In this lies our great peril.  If, as a fact, the method of the Law Courts is barred, and if we are to trust very largely to the judgments achieved through open discussion, then it is essential to secure that there is an organic body qualified to carry on the discussion.

      So we emerge from a perilous century of cross-currents.  The way has been hard, and we have had bad hours, but we know now that we ought not to have expected anything else.  It is hard to be a Christian, and always will be.  We are believers in a Revelation that leaves much unexplained.  We can serve and love a catholic church, which, catholic though it be, nevertheless bears the scars of a troubled story, and has suffered, and lost, and finds it difficult to make way, and sees before her a doubtful and clouded road.  All this belongs to her heritage, and is consistent with her claims.  We are not going to fail her just because she needs the best help that we can give her.  Her outlines may be less rigid and clear than we once fancied they would be, but her central life is running strongly.  She has come through so much, that we are sure that she will survive the worst that can be done or said against her.  She has learned to rely on her own voluntary efforts, and less and less on state support.  Her intellectual and social environment has greatly bettered.  Science and religion have no longer any quarrel.  So Sir Oliver Lodge told us two years ago.  The influences dominant now in the economic and industrial sphere are not antagonistic, as of old.  They are collective, cooperative, altruistic.  There is a pathetic readiness to welcome the church’s laggard approaches.  If only she will trust herself, and the Spirit of God that is in her!  She has but to put out her true innate power.  Let her concentrate all her power upon her central act of worship.  Let her, in hours of perplexity, be content to reassert her central verities, avoiding definitions and deductions, leaving the declaration to do its work by its own spiritual weight and momentum.  Let her give freedom, elasticity, variety, to her minor offices.  Let her show to living people that she can teach them, in perfectly plain and simple speech, by ways that are intelligible to any human heart that cares to learn, how to live as they ought, and to die in Christ.  She has but to be loyal in her own claims, and she will live.  What clogs her, what chokes her, is our dreadful worldliness, our conventionality, our stupidity.  We, her individual members, are the main cause of her defeat.  It is we who make her name a byword for timidity and cowardice.  Now, when the terrible war passes, will be her opportunity; and that opportunity will be open, fair, and clear, if you. and I will but abase ourselves in the dust for our intolerable disloyalty, in the past, to the dear Mother Church at whose Font we were reborn and by whose Bread we have been fed.

VIII – Intellectual and Moral Liberty in the Church

      ‘That man is free whose flesh is controlled by the law of his mind, and whose mind is directed by the government of God.’  So Leo the Great defines liberty.  Perhaps we should be disposed to ask St. Leo to amend the latter half of his noble definition by substituting the words ‘and whose mind is enlightened and directed by the Spirit of God.’  So amended, the definition corresponds better to the New Testament idea of liberty.  Thus, on the one hand, there is no liberty in self-indulgence.  ‘He that committeth sin is the slave of sin.’  His higher nature is dragged at the chariot wheels of his lower self.  Liberty is self-control, and that man only is free whose flesh is controlled by the law of his mind.  But also there is no liberty in mere self-government.  Man is by nature utterly dependent upon God.  The claim of independence is a false claim.  Man must surrender himself to God in order to be truly himself.  And God is manifested in Jesus Christ.  Thus to be ‘the slave of Jesus Christ’ is perfect liberty.  In complete surrender of will and mind and heart to Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, every man realises his true being; and the link between the believer and his Lord is Christ’s own Spirit given to him.  Thus where the Spirit rules, there is liberty. [So Dr. Chase would have us read 2 Cor. iii. 17: ου δε το πνευμα κυριεύει, ελευθερία  See J.T.S., October 1915, p. 63.]  It is something much higher than irrational obedience which is opened out to the Christian.  It is intelligent correspondence with the divine purpose; it is cooperation with God in the fulfillment of the divine will for the world, for mankind, and for each individual.  Thus ‘If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ [St. John 8:36.]

      This idea of liberty as self-realisation by obedience to God has haunted the imagination of all the higher moralists and has gained expression in non-Christian philosophy, as among the Stoics.  ‘We are born in a kingdom; to obey God is liberty,’ says Seneca. [Sen. De vitâ beatâ, 15.]  ‘Only vice enslaves; only virtue liberates,’ says a contemporary of St. Paul. [The author of The Letters of Heracleitus.]  But the idea receives definition in Christianity and becomes available for all men, because the unseen God has been effectively made known in Jesus Christ, and in Him all men can be really redeemed from sin and can receive with conscious assurance the gift of the divine Spirit.

      We may trace out some of the implications of the idea of liberty.

      1. It is something higher than mere obedience to laws, even laws which have a divine sanction.  St. Paul’s insistence on this is unmistakable.  St. Paul is not merely opposed to the imposition upon Christians of the Jewish law.  He is afraid of laws, afraid of men merely resting upon external orders in religion.  ‘Ye observe days and months and seasons and years.  I am afraid of you.’  ‘With freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage.’  If ye died with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, do ye subject yourselves to ordinances.  Handle not, nor taste, nor touch (all which things are to perish with the using), after the precepts and doctrines of men?’ [Gal. 4:10–11; Col. 2:20–22.]  There are indeed for the Christian divine precepts, as well as doctrines, which he is bound to observe.  St. Paul’s language, therefore, suggests and receives modification, as we shall notice.  But the idea is plain.  The Christian is intended to be so personally possessed by the principles of truth and by the enlightening Spirit that he is governed from within himself, and lives no longer in dependence on the authority of other men outside him, priests or prophets or scribes.  That is the intention – that every Christian should be so educated as to be ‘perfect’ [Col. 1:28.] – a fully initiated man.  There are not to be two classes in Christianity, one which knows and the other which depends upon them for instruction.  All are to know for themselves.  This is St. John’s teaching also.  ‘Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye know all things.  I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and because no lie is of the truth.’  ‘The anointing that ye received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you.’ [1 St. John 2:20, 21, 27.]  This accounts for a characteristic of the New Testament Epistles – that though they are intended for all the people, they deal with principles, as if all would be interested in them.  At times, indeed, they give sharp orders or prohibitions, but in the main they are occupied in making the theological and practical principles of our religion the possession and interest of every Spirit-guided and enlightened member of the body.  St. Paul maintains the authority and function of the apostolic ministry, and is thus an advocate of priesthood.  But priesthood has commonly carried with it in human history the idea of a knowledge of divine things possessed by one class, upon which all others are dependent for information, whose word is to be to them sufficient direction.  In this sense St. Paul and St. John would have to be acknowledged to be unsacerdotal.  All Christians, according to them, share the priesthood of knowledge, the knowledge of the mysteries of God, His secret counsels now revealed and made the common possession of His whole people.  And this idea goes back to our Lord.  ‘Woe unto you lawyers!  For ye took away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.’ [St. Luke 11:52.]  Our Lord would have the kingdom of knowledge open to all.  And that this may be so, all must be trained to exercise their minds.  They must not depend on any class of scribes.  Thus it is very noticeable how undogmatic our Lord’s method generally is.  Weak human nature is full of questions and wants.  It cries out to priests and prophets, ‘Give us a plain answer to a plain question.’

      Now our Lord surrounds Himself with men full of questions – men who in the fullest sense ‘were desirous to ask Him.’  But He hardly ever gives a plain answer to a plain question.  We are so often reproached, irritably enough, because we cannot or do not do so; and our conduct is so often contrasted with that of ministers of the Roman church, who succeed better in meeting the demand, that it is important to call attention to this.  When our Lord is asked a question He habitually answers by another; or gives some indirect answer; or speaks a parable which stimulates but does not satisfy.  He is manifestly afraid of giving positive information about spiritual things too easily or cheaply.  He means His disciples to exercise their wits; to ask themselves questions; to wait upon experience; to acquire principles or convictions about God, about themselves and Himself, which will enable them to have knowledge in themselves.  Thus we notice that He does not tell them plainly that He is the Christ, but waits to elicit the confession from the lips of St. Peter.  That our Lord is sparing in His use of the dogmatic method is indisputably true in the main; and He definitely takes His stand against what I described just now as a false sacerdotalism, the sacerdotalism which divides men into permanent classes – the select class holding the spiritual keys and the rest depending upon their information.  This is the meaning of the great saying, ‘The disciple is not above his teacher; but every one, when he is perfected, shall be as his teacher.’ [St. Luke 6:40.]

      2. It is in accordance with the principle of universal enlightenment that the New Testament is so totally free from obscurantism.  You cannot, as far as I know, anywhere in the New Testament find the least jealousy of knowledge.  I cannot imagine St. Paul or St. John, or, be it said with reverence, our Lord being jealous of any kind of investigation into the facts of nature or history.  There is in the New Testament a strong disapprobation of ‘knowledge falsely so called’, because it is unprofitable, like the investigation of ‘myths and endless genealogies’ (whatever that may mean), or because it is uncertain, being dependent upon visions of the unseen world which have no adequate security, or because it does not lead to healthy progress in virtue. [Col. 2:18; 1 Tim. 1:4, 4:7, 8, 6:3; 2 Tim. 1:13 &c.]  But the temper encouraged in the New Testament is an eye quite wide-opened to the whole of truth that is really ascertainable and at the same time alive to the limitations of the knowledge of the unseen world which is at present granted to the church.  A church that believes that ‘we know only in part,’ and see spiritual realities only ‘in a mirror’ – i.e. as a blurred reflection – or ‘in riddles,’ will always be very cautious in its dogmatic pronouncements, and open to fuller light.

      3. There goes with the spirit of Christian liberty a great respect for individuality and the individual conscience.  As we shall see that must have limits, but the limits are wide.  St. Paul seeks to convince men; not to silence them.  He is very tolerant of differences of opinion, except where he perceives the foundations to be at stake.  ‘One has his gift in this way and another in that; [1 Cor. 7:7.] who art thou that judgest the servant of another?  To his own lord he standeth or falleth. ... One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike.  Let each man be fully assured in his own mind.’  Do not, he urges, be narrower than our Lord has been in receiving men into the church.  ‘Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.’ [Rom. 14:4–5, 15:7.]  This is a doctrine of very liberal government.  There is plenty of room here for difference of opinion and individuality.  And our Lord had a marked respect for individuality.  As I have said, He loved to encourage questions and, if He did not answer them, it was to throw the questioner back on himself and his own resources.  The disciples had a great tendency to quarrel.  There were indeed marked differences of character among them; and our Lord rebukes their jealousy and quarrelsomeness; but He never seeks to suppress their questioning by external direction or to impress unity upon them by dictation.

      4. I must add that the New Testament gives no countenance to the principle of invoking the state or civil government to coerce men’s belief or to punish them for misbelief.  Those Christians of the first four centuries who assert so strongly that religion should be a matter of free spiritual persuasion and not of state compulsion surely express the spirit of the New Testament.  St. Augustine unhappily gave in his adhesion to the opposite principle, and relied in so doing on a phrase in a single parable (‘Compel them to come in’), which does not really suggest state compulsion, unless we confuse the parable with its application.  It is true that the principle of state compulsion in matters of religion and state penalties, even the punishment of death, for heresy or nonconformity, obtained an almost undisputed sway from the fifth century to the seventeenth.  But the fact is only a warning how widespread a fundamental error may become in the church.  I suppose we may say that there is now general agreement among Christians of all kinds, and even practically in the Roman church, that the state is to leave men free in matters of religious belief, and that conformity to the true religion is not to be a matter of state compulsion.

      Thus the New Testament – both Gospels and Epistles – presents us with an ideal of liberty, moral and intellectual, which attracts and inspires and satisfies what is most elevated and heroic in men and women.  And the saints of all ages and countries have kept the ideal alive, and presented it in an infinite variety of characters.  But as soon as the church became popular and Christianity a matter of course, a quite different ideal tended to substitute itself over the main area of the church.  The church set itself to the task of keeping masses of unconverted men, who had no intention of being otherwise than worldly, whether barbarian or highly civilised, in some sort of order.  With this object in view, it allowed itself to become a law which the average man could be induced to observe.  This has meant a lowering of moral standard, and at the same time an increase of the element of mere observance, and an intensifying of the element of dogma and authority.  For the mass of men do not want the trouble of thinking.  They are prepared to take their religious beliefs and practices passively from their priests, if they are not laid under too severe a moral requirement.  In the New Testament it is the moral requirement which is intense; and it is assumed that where the will is alert and good, the intellect will be enlightened and truth welcome.  ‘He that willeth to do God’s will shall know of the doctrine.’  The church, on the contrary, has very commonly emphasised the dogmatic and relaxed the moral requirement by various accommodations and modifying traditions.  To be a good Christian has tended to mean accepting the required creed and performing the required observances without any very severe demand being made upon the life.  Even for the devout, who are ready for great things, it has been made a chief virtue to accept religious direction and follow the guidance of a superior.

      Thus it has come about that a false kind of sacerdotalism alien to the spirit of the New Testament has arisen.  It has been regarded as the function of the priests to know and teach, and the function of the people to submit and learn.  Any attempt on the part of the laity to rise to something like the level of the New Testament has seemed like rebellion.  An almost comic instance of this false sacerdotalism will be remembered by some of you in a letter of Mgr. George Talbot, written to rebuke what he regarded as the insolence of the Roman Catholic laity in 1867, zealous for the honour of Newman:

      ‘What is the province of the laity?  To hunt, to shoot, to entertain.  These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all, and the affair of Newman is a matter purely ecclesiastical.’

Moreover, whenever the church has suffered its dogmatic functions to become so much exaggerated, it has behaved almost inevitably like an intellectual tyrant to men of intelligence.  Some ‘new learning’ has arisen and occupied the minds of men.  The church has become alarmed, and has denounced and threatened, relying on the strength of its claims or the force of its arm rather than on the truth of its statements, and the whole ideal of intellectual liberty within the church has become obscured or lost.  So it is in the history of the church that the New Testament ideal of moral and intellectual liberty has been endangered or weakened.

      And the root cause of the declension has been, I believe, the lowering of the moral standard, to make the Christian profession easily tolerable to flesh and blood.  In fact, the New Testament ideal of liberty postulates – not, indeed, a perfect church, but a church consisting in the main of converted people, who with hearty good-will have accepted the service of Christ and are prepared to suffer for Him and with Him, and to be active in His cause.  In other words, the ideal of moral liberty is only possible where Christianity is felt really to involve separation from the worldly world – a standard quite above conventional respectability – an active service of God.

      Liberty in the New Testament, or sonship, which is another name for the same thing, is, we must observe, not proclaimed as an endowment of human nature as it stands – not something we are born with, but something possible to us, because in Christ we have been redeemed out of the world.  You recall the noble lines of Dante:

Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,

e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:

perch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio.

‘Free, upright, and whole is thy will, and ’twere a fault not to act according to its promptings; wherefore I crown thee and mitre thee, king and priest over thyself.’  These lines are paraphrased thus by Philip Wicksteed.  ‘Dante has recovered from the dire effects of the fall of man; his will is free, unwarped, and sound; he has no further need of direction or directive institutions; he has reached the goal of all imperial and ecclesiastical organisations, and is king and bishop of himself.’  Liberty, that is to say, is the fruit of moral victory which is perfected only in Paradise Regained; but is begun here and now in every faithful member of Christ.  The more baptism and confirmation – the twofold ceremony of Christian initiation – is really understood to mean renunciation of the worldly world and entrance upon the Christian warfare and service, the easier becomes the realisation of the ideal of moral liberty for all, the true ideal of the priestly body.  But also the Christian ideal postulates an intellectual conversion.  The convert has not only surrendered his will to Christ, but he has received in Christ a divine message.

      ‘When ye received from us the word of the message, even the word of God, ye accepted it not as the word of man, but, as it is in truth, the word of God.’ [1 Thess. 2:13.]  This divine message is a simple message, in that all can receive it; but it is a complex truth – a wonderful complex of truths all interdependent – about God, and human nature and destiny; about Christ, incarnate God; about the atonement He has won by His death; about His resurrection and glory; about His Spirit and His body the church; about His apostolate; His sacraments of grace and fellowship; about His second coming, and the divine judgment, and the kingdom of God which is to be.  All these ‘articles’ of faith, indissolubly coherent one with another, constitute the assumed background of St. Paul’s Epistles.  They make up ‘the message’ which had been received by the converts in believing in Christ, as being truly the word of God.  This was ‘the pattern of teaching whereunto’ all Christians ‘were delivered’ [Rom. 6:17.] – a pattern or mould which is to fashion them in heart and will and mind.  To impress this on all converts was the primary function of the teaching church.  And the intellectual liberty of the Christian was conditioned by the fact that with his whole heart, in accepting the service of Christ, he had accepted this pattern of sound words as the ‘faith once for all delivered.’  I fancy it is hardly possible to exaggerate the degree to which the ideal of intellectual and moral liberty which is the real ideal of Christianity is bound up with the maintenance of the idea that Christianity is the religion of the genuinely converted, who know that they are embarking on a costly service, and also with the maintenance of the idea that Christianity is based upon a divine and supernatural message of God which the intellect is to welcome by faith, on the authority of Christ Himself, and so grow, from faith and devotion, into fuller and fuller understanding.

      Who does not know what it is in England to despair of the ideal of intellectual liberty in the church, because liberty seems to run so often to eccentricity and licence?  And we trace this tendency to the fact that so few Englishmen have ever with real attention given ear to and heartily received the faith in its living unity as what it truly is, the word of God.  They have no real initial sense of what the faith is, and so, when they become serious and wish to think, they become the victims of the first eccentricity which falls in their way.

      I alluded above to limitations or conditions of St. Paul’s doctrine of Christian liberty, moral and intellectual (which is indeed not in any special sense St. Paul’s, but that of the New Testament as a whole).  They are two:

      1. The first I have already stated.  The condition of freedom is conversion and regeneration, conversion which involves a real abandonment of the worldly world and a real entry upon the service of God in Christ; and regeneration, of which baptism is the instrument, which involves a thorough reception of the message of salvation, the rule of Christian faith and practice.  This idea of Christian liberty was admirably carried out in principle in the early catechetical system of the church, in the models of catechetical instruction which survive to us, such as St. Cyril’s lectures, or St. Gregory of Nyssa’s more intellectual catechesis, or St. Augustine’s instructions for teachers and taught; it is expressed also in the moving ceremonies, which are so much more than ceremonies, of Christian initiation, the Western ‘scrutinia’ leading on to the actual baptism and laying-on of hands.  You will find a sufficient account of them given by Duchesne in his ‘Origines du Culte Crétien’.  It should be noticed that the whole rite of Christian baptism was fashioned and developed for adults with a full consciousness of responsibility, and was only later adapted to the baptism of infants, who are to be represented so far as responsibility goes by their sponsors.  It is most important to emphasise the ideal.  Christian moral liberty does not mean the liberty to do as one pleases, to follow the ‘unruly wills and affections of sinful men,’ the desires and devices of our unregenerate hearts; it means liberty to realise in ourselves and for ourselves a tremendously difficult moral ideal or standard which we have deliberately and consciously accepted.  In the same way the intellectual liberty of the Christian is not liberty to think as he pleases, or to follow any current school of philosophy or speculation, but liberty to rise up to the fuller and fuller understanding of that ‘rule of faith,’ the summary of the message of God, which all alike have solemnly accepted by the act of faith which admits them to Christian fellowship.  The more wholehearted their faith the greater will be their liberty to use in Christ all the resources of the intellect.  There can be no question that this is St. Paul’s ideal of intellectual liberty – liberty ‘to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height’ involved in the fundamental faith.

      2. ‘With all the saints’ – that brings me to the second condition of Christian liberty, that it is personal, but not individualistic.  A true philosophy will justify Christianity in maintaining that human personality is at bottom not merely individual, but social.  And in the church the principle is conspicuous.  There is not in human history a grander exhibition of a corporate consciousness than is to be found in the early Christian church.  Truly the Christian church acted and thought as a body inspired by one spirit.  And its answers to the cross-questionings of current philosophy, or current heresy, or to the problems, practical and sacramental, which were forced upon it by circumstances, were truly the answers of one body, with almost one common corporate personality.  Thus St. Paul would never suffer a Christian, least of all a Christian teacher, to forget his corporate obligation.  It will be noticed that St. Paul can be from time to time sharply dogmatic: ‘We command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly and not after the traditions which they received of us.’ [2 Thess. 3:6.]  ‘Put away the wicked man from among yourselves.’ [1 Cor. 5:13.]  So he speaks in view of tendencies to moral laxity: ‘Unto the married I give charge, yea not I, but the Lord’; [1 Cor 7:10.] so of the indissolubility of Christian marriage: ‘Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema.  As we have said before, so say I now again, If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema.’  ‘Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I delivered unto Satan that they might be taught not to blaspheme.’ [Gal. 1;8, 9; 1 Tim. 1:20.]  Thus he speaks of any proposed alteration in the religious faith which he judged to be fundamental: ‘Behold, I Paul say unto you that, if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing.’ [Gal. 5:2.]  So of any practice involving a fundamentally false principle.  St. John’s language is quite as sharp: ‘If any man cometh unto you and bringeth not this doctrine (that Jesus Christ [not only is come, but] cometh in the flesh) receive him not into your house and give him no greeting.’ [2 John 10.]  The principle of all this sturdy dogmatism and unflinching demand for excommunication, when necessary, lies in the recognition that there is a common life of the Christian church, based upon or involving a common faith, the recognition in common of facts and principles, of which the ministers of the church, as stewards of the divine mysteries, are the trustees.  This is the tradition which all must keep.  Any individualism which violates this is met by the sharp question, ‘What? was it from you that the word of God went forth? or came it unto you alone?’ [1 Cor. 14:36.]  No, it is of divine origin, and it is a common tradition over all the churches. It admits of much variety of individual and local development.  St. Paul would not probably agree with St. Leo in his emphatic assertion that ‘truth, which is simple and one, does not admit of any variety.’  But he would be as emphatic as Leo in maintaining the necessary basis for catholic unity, moral and intellectual.

      There is one other aspect of Christian liberty which I notice only to pass by – what may be called group liberty.  If Christianity is catholic, as St. Paul contends, super-national, super-racial, yet each race, each nation, each Christian group within the wider unity, will develop according to its special temperament a specially characteristic, and therefore an essentially partial, manner of Christian life and manner of holding and teaching Christian truth.  There will thus be various types of catholicism, as in the early church, African, Roman, Alexandrian, Syrian; or later, Spanish, French, German, English, Russian; or in the future, Chinese, Corean, Japanese, Indian, African.  And the church catholic within the common creed and the common moral ‘law of liberty’ will, if it be truly catholic, give scope and freedom for national churches.  This has been already admirably pleaded before you by Dr. Figgis, and I propose at this moment to do no more than indicate that I have not forgotten it, and that it belongs to the general subject of moral and intellectual liberty.

      Now to summarise.  There is in the New Testament a splendid ideal of moral and intellectual liberty which rises far up above the standard of the false sacerdotalism which divides mankind into teachers and taught, the men who know and the men who must obey; which is totally free from obscurantism; which has the most genuine respect for individuality; which glories in comprehension, and receives ‘in its broad compass manifold and manifest differences and phases of Christian teaching and thinking, individual and corporate; which dreads mere external law, and is sparing of dogma; which reasons and appeals rather than it pronounces and defines; which would have all members of the church take their share in the affairs of the church; which lays its main stress on the greatness of the moral claim in Christ, and assumes that one who willeth to do the will of God will know of the doctrine.  And there is a lower kind of Christianity which, without ceasing to be Christian and to produce very noble types of Christianity, does in the main reverse these maxims and principles of liberty, and runs to what is the lower type of sacerdotalism, in which the layman’s duty is summed up in obedience to a priesthood and acceptance of dogma, and which is consistent with a very low standard of average Christianity.  And there is another lower type of Christianity, in which the claim of membership is so relaxed that individualism becomes rampant, and liberty becomes misrepresented as the liberty to do what you please and to think as you are disposed.

      The conclusion which I commend to you is this.  The true ideal of Christian liberty, intellectual and moral, is possible only when the standard of Christian membership is maintained at a very high level, especially its moral demand.  If Christianity is ever allowed to become a matter of course for the ordinary man, anything at all like the New Testament standard of liberty becomes impossible.  For that is the sort of liberty which is possible only for the really converted, who have really and deliberately taken up the service of Christ, and who really desire to be active members of His body in the cause of His truth and righteousness.  And in its intellectual aspect the ideal Christian liberty is possible only when entrance into the full privileges of the body of Christ means a conscious and thorough acceptance of the rule of faith or word of God, the common creed of ideas and facts, and it is frankly recognised that on this basis alone the fabric of Christian thought can be raised.  St. Paul would not have tolerated any theory of infant baptism such as would make membership of Christ something which embraces all men without any corresponding effort.  And St. Paul would have shrunk from no severity of excommunication such as would prove necessary to maintain the reality of the moral standard in the whole community or the great tradition of the faith.

      Now, from the point of view of this idea of Christian liberty I see in the church of England a body which has sinned deeply, but still has granted her by God a great opportunity.  The church of England has deeply participated in the sins and misdirections of energy which have degraded the idea of Christian liberty.  In two respects particularly: 1. By its identification of church and state – by confusing church privileges and functions with state privileges and functions, so that the arm of the state has been used to constrain men to church conformity.  That is, in the main, an error of the past.  I suppose that now again, after thirteen hundred years of error, we all hold with Lactantius that nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion, and that to tolerate any intrusion of the arm of the state to enforce compliance with church injunctions or church doctrine is a degradation of Christianity and a conversion of state authority into tyranny.  2. But the other Anglican error is still dominant.  It is that of cheapening membership.  It is that of making membership cost nothing.  It is that of subjecting the catechumen to no testing discipline, with the result that liberty, being the liberty of the really unconverted, becomes licence.  And inasmuch as we are an unintellectual people, who hate the trouble of thinking, the real doctrinal impress of the common faith has been so slight and negligible on those who are admitted to membership, and perhaps even to official ministry, that individualism in thought has broken down the coherence of the faith.

      But in spite of the manifold or conspicuous shortcomings of the church of England, I still would claim that the ideal of moral and intellectual liberty which we find in the New Testament is nowhere better represented than in the intention of our Prayer book.  There is but one thing which we must do if we would realise this ideal, and that is to prefer reality to numbers.  I do not doubt that to make church membership real – to insist on a higher standard of church membership – would mean an immense reduction of numbers.  I should be prepared to contend that even so we should be much more really useful to the nation as a whole than we are at present.  But my contention now is that only where church membership means much, is the New Testament ideal of liberty at all likely to be realised practically.  And the intention of the Prayer book is that church membership should mean much.  It has been our current practice to baptise infants indiscriminately, and, I think, with disastrous results.  But no one can say that this is the intention of the Prayer book.  The institution of sponsors, the requirement of instruction, and the examination and renewal of vows before confirmation – these provisions are meant to give reality to the baptism of infants.  Thus the Christian ceremonies of initiation in the Prayer book, as in the ancient church, embody a profound moral claim.  As we go on in life, still the Prayer book would maintain the moral claim.  It would have us live as under the sense of a social law, which finds expression in the catechism and in rubrics and exhortations, as well as in the Commination Service.  It directs the use of a public discipline, penance, and reconciliation for notorious offences, and it also offers for private sins the opportunity of private confession and reconciliation.  It maintains the strict law of indissoluble marriage.  Even by the bedside of the sick and the grave of the departed it will not suffer us to forget the moral obligations of membership.

      Now all this is quite compatible with a changed relation of the church to civil society.  For instance the church nay maintain the stricter law of marriage for its own members while acknowledging that it is not maintainable for the whole of civil society.  It is quite true that changes in details of our rules of membership would be required if it were practically in force.  What I am contending is this only – that the Prayer book maintains such a standard of membership as involves a real moral effort in those who are to be initiated, and in those who are to continue in fellowship.  And my point is that such reality of standard is the only basis on which the New Testament ideal of moral liberty can flourish.  It is the liberty of those to whom renunciation is real and service acceptable.

      Intellectually, again, I should claim that the Prayer book is true to the ideas of the New Testament.  There is sacerdotalism, but not the false sacerdotalism.  Our church would insist that every Christian is to be admitted to full knowledge, and is to be encouraged to ‘test all things’.  Like St. Cyril of Jerusalem, it would have the catechist say to the catechumen, ‘Do not believe me simply, unless you receive the proof of what I say from Holy Scripture.’  It makes a great deal of an ‘open Bible’, and subjects the teaching of the church in every way to the results of the free appeal to Scripture.  If we have not been successful in teaching the mass of our people, we cannot say that the intention of the Prayer book has been represented by the low level of our actual attainment.  And we may claim that in the higher walks of intellect our church has been the home of sound learning and free inquiry.  Moreover, the dogmatic requirements of our church are restricted, restricted by the appeal to Scripture, to what is central and original.  On this basis it has been as comprehensive as St. Paul could wish.  On the other hand, there is no doubt at all that our church does take its stand as firmly as possible on the ancient creed, the original word or message of God, and again, like St. Paul and St. John, would allow no tampering with this foundation.  We have not made the best of our heritage.  But if the lineaments of Christian liberty are best represented by St. Paul and St. John, then I think the Prayer book gives us an ideal picture of what the church is meant to be, which neither St. Paul nor St. John would disown.

IX – The Vocation of the Church of England

      These lectures have been chiefly occupied with the past.  Their particular aim has been to set forth and to illustrate the way in which the Church of England has undergone its many changes, while preserving, as we thank God it has been enabled to preserve, those essentials of Christian faith and apostolic order that stamp it unmistakably as a living and true part of the visible, historical, Catholic society, of which the Lord Himself is the one and only Head.

      It is no slight matter that we can thus look back upon the past.  Are others Catholics?  So are we.  Do they point us through a long hereditary line to the days when the hands of Apostles were laid upon men, who in their turn were commissioned to entrust to successors the maintenance of the evangelical tradition and the stewardship of the ministry of grace?  Our line for its most part was identical with theirs.  Have they gone through times of storm and stress, and been in perils even among false brethren?  So have we; and when we have been delivered it has been by the mercy and guidance of Him who has wrought marvellously for us, not less than for them.  In no spirit of boasting we can say that we would not, if we could, exchange our past for any other that we know.

      But we do not forget that God can make the mere stones to be as the sons of Abraham.  We have lately been reminded that ‘nations cannot exist by traditions alone.’ [Mr. Asquith, November 2, 1915.]  Individuals and institutions – if they are to live and justify their existence – must have a purpose, a mission, an aim, a sense of a function to be discharged, a task to be fulfilled; in a word, must have a vocation, and must find their strength and wellbeing in consciously responding to it.  The Church of England can be no exception to this rule; and English churchmen do well to realise the fact.  An Englishman, it has been said, relies upon his subconsciousness rather than upon any clear guidance of the logical faculty.  That is perhaps only a kindly way of describing what is more often called his inveterate habit of ‘muddling through’.  He has strangely little sense of the need for seeing distinctly what is ahead of him.  He is often – perhaps it would be true to say he is usually – quite curiously successful.  His practical instincts are apt to lead him right.  But the cost is nearly always very great.  If he just escapes being ‘too late,’ he arrives only after a vast and it may be an extravagant expenditure.  His vagueness can be a defect and a menace.  In a crisis he knows this, and may have to cry out for a leadership that will save him from himself.

      So then, as we have thought of the past, it will be well that we should direct our attention to the present and the future.  Let us try to get, if we can, some clear idea of the special functions of the Church of England, functions which must be discharged if it is to take its appointed and necessary place in Christendom.

      How are we to get it?  No doubt if we were able to see ourselves as others see us we might be helped to the knowledge we desire.  But, as this is not possible, we shall have to depend upon our own powers of self-diagnosis, and upon the best judgments we can form as to our character and endowments.  There is a way by which we can tell whether our conclusions, when we form them, are sound.  We can test them by the answering verdict of our hearts and consciences.  If they awaken an immediate response in the depths of our being, we may take it that they really represent what is the truest for us.

      I shall ask you to consider the three things for which, as I believe, our English church is specially intended to stand; the three causes which have appealed and will always appeal to us so long as we remain what we are.  The fact that in each case the task is a difficult one will only strengthen the conviction of those who fully believe that ‘when God has a hard thing to be done, He tells it to His Englishmen.’

      As we think of our vocation it will not always be possible to distinguish between what has been laid upon us as a nation and what has been laid upon us as a church.  Nor, indeed, shall we be careful to do this.  If we may not identify the church and the nation, as some before us have done, we may freely allow that the national characteristics are continually to be seen exemplified in the attitude and temper of the church; and, on the other hand, it is no less true to say that the spirit of the church has been one of the strongest influences – perhaps the very strongest – in shaping the character of the nation.

      In the first place, then – who will doubt it? – we were meant to stand for Freedom.  That the people of our islands are ready to contend for their liberty has been demonstrated times without number.  The popular expressions of the fact are too trite to need repetition.  Through and through the British fibre runs the unconquerable determination to be free.  We claim with right that our land is the home of free institutions.  Individuals are free.  We have a free Parliament, and a free Press.  More wonderful still, we are the heart and centre of a free Empire, stablished and developed upon the voluntary principle.  Those who did not understand us imagined that a blow, if not a touch, would upset the whole structure.  They have discovered their mistake.  The British Empire, with its ninety units, embracing the widest diversities of self-governing types, has held together as one man.  We could not have compelled our Dominions to send us levies of men, or to make contributions of money.  There was never the least need to be anxious about either.  The rush among them was to decide which could be first, and which could give most.  As a trans-Atlantic writer has put it:

      The fact cannot be gainsaid that England has the knack of making men step out of their own free will to die in her defence.  She has the gift of keeping alive, across tumbling seas, round half a world, the undying bond that unites the heart to home.  She has shown herself indifferent to the possession of the taxing power over her Colonies, but what matters it?  Those Colonies willingly tax themselves to send her warships, and their sons seize their rifles to go to her aid. [From an article in the St. Louis Republic.]

      In very deed this loosely knit Empire of ours is proving itself to be the strongest of political fabrics.  And mainly because all men know that within its borders they are more free than they could possibly remain elsewhere.  Not that for a moment we desire to have a monopoly of freedom.  Nay, we hold our place in the world just because it is understood by most of our neighbours that we have no wish to encroach upon the liberties of others.  Our continuance as an Empire is suffered, is even welcomed, because it is felt that, as some one has said, unless we go mad we shall never be likely to aim at world domination.  We are fighting, at this crisis of the world’s history, to deliver Europe from the would-be supremacy of a single Power.  That has been our policy since the days of Queen Elizabeth.  ‘We wish the nations of Europe to be free to live their independent lives, working out their own forms of government for themselves, and their own development, whether they be great states or small states, in full liberty.’ [Speech at the Bechstein Hall, March 22, 1915.]  When Sir Edward Grey spoke these words, he was speaking for us all.  They accurately express what we feel to be one of the chief aims of our national existence.

      I have ventured to dwell thus upon this particular function of our life as a nation for the sake of illustrating and illuminating the first requirement of our vocation as a church.  The balance of power is a matter which concerns not the wellbeing of nations alone.  If these lectures have succeeded in making anything clear, it has been the process by which Christendom became the scene of a greet ecclesiastical encroachment, in direct contradiction to the command of our Lord, who most plainly contrasted the despotism of the then rulers of the world with what was ever to be the temper of His disciples.

      Ours is not the only section of the Catholic church which has protested against this usurpation of authority and dominion.  The churches of the East were before us, and are no less pronounced in their attitude today.  It has been a terrible conflict.  All the resources of unlimited assertion and an unrivalled organisation have been hurled against us, and many and many a time there have been those among us whose hearts have failed, and who have been ready to think of peace upon the only terms upon which it has ever been offered – terms of unconditional surrender.  But the mass of English churchmen know too well what has happened, and what must happen, when the worst of all despotisms, intellectual and spiritual despotism, is suffered to prevail.  We long for peace, and pray and labour for it, in the assurance that the Spirit of God means yet to bring it to pass.  But we know that it can never be secured by the acceptance of conditions which make freedom and progress impossible.

      In the prayer which we offer upon our knees in our Convocations every day they meet we use the words ‘tyrannidem papalem merito et serio repudiavimus,’ and we mean what we say.  Moreover, we are certain that none will yet bless us more heartily for maintaining our protest than those against whom unhappily it has still to be made.  May we be strengthened to persevere in making it so long as is necessary with dignity and firmness and charity.

      But the call of freedom demands from us more than any one effort, however great, in any single direction.  We must beware lest we impose upon others that which we are right in refusing to have imposed upon ourselves.  We must provide for the independence and due development of our daughter churches, colonial and missionary, within the broad bounds of the Anglican communion.  Indeed, there are no Christians in any communion, however small, who should not be able to look to us for sympathy and encouragement whenever they need it.

      Then there is still the problem of ‘a free church in a free state,’ in some ways the most difficult and delicate of all our problems.  We attempted to deal with it as far back as the Great Charter.  It is a task which will require much more patience and courage and skill.

      We have difficult problems within the church that are calling for satisfactory treatment; problems of the corporate life, of synodical government, of the administration of discipline, of freedom for the exercise of spiritual gifts.  And there will always remain the need for the witness on behalf of the liberty and responsibility which belong to each individual soul in the presence of God.  We all believe that the duty of bearing this witness has been laid in a special degree upon the English church.

      But we dare not forget that there are perils to be faced on the path of freedom itself.  Liberty is no negative thing.  It does not consist in the absence of authority.  It has to be carefully guarded, lest it should too easily be degraded into most mischievous licence.  To say this is the same thing as saying that there are other great qualities which must characterise the individual, the nation, or the church that aspires to be the possessor and the instrument of freedom.

      We pass on, therefore, to think of the second obligation of our English vocation.  There need be no hesitation in saying what it is.  We have but to remember the great words, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’  No men can be free men unless they are the servants of Truth.  We may dare to say that we have not been quite unmindful of this.  We have felt glad when other races have talked about ‘the truth of an Englishman’ and have been ready to take his word for his bond.  We should sorely grieve if ever it ceased to be so.

      And I could hope that our hearts will as clearly endorse the proposition that it is the vocation of the church of England to range itself boldly on the side of truth, prepared to follow wherever this may lead.  When Bishop Creighton declared that ‘the Church of England rests upon an appeal to sound learning,’ [The Church and the Nation, p. 251.] we felt that it was a right description, if not a wholly complete description, of our position and work.  And by ‘sound learning’ we understood him to mean what was true, as distinguished from what was fabricated or merely popular and expedient.  Three centuries and more ago the Church of England faced the duty of combining fidelity to the old learning with a loyal acceptance of the new.  It dared to give the best knowledge to the many.  It put the Bible in English within the reach of all.  It has spent much, and laboured much, for the education of the people in schools and universities.  It has produced an unfailing succession of wise thinkers and teachers.  The need for such has been growing increasingly.

      The last hundred years have brought us a bewildering inrush of fresh knowledge, scientific, historical, social, and economic.  Scarcely within a like period has the human mind been called upon to assort and assimilate so much that was new.  The trial to religious belief has been severe, often almost to the breaking point.  Only those who have carefully studied the story of the scientific advance can know the difficulties that had to be met; and they will be ready to allow that the English church, on the whole and through its most representative thinkers, has intelligently and honestly confronted the problems raised, and has in consequence led the way towards a larger, firmer faith, in which once again the old and the new have been united and harmonised.

      Bishop Harvey Goodwin used to tell how one who was present at the funeral of Charles Darwin in the Abbey remarked to him, ‘Had this death occurred in France, no priest would have taken part; or, if he had, no scientific man would have been present.’  We do not criticise others, whose function is different from ours; but we can rejoice that such a combination to do honour to a humble student of Nature should have been possible, and should have seemed natural, with us.

      We know, of course, that there is a type of religious devotion which can be produced in an atmosphere of intellectual ignorance.  We have no wish to underrate its worth, but we have never felt that we could thus seek to produce it.  We find nothing in the New Testament that could warrant our saying to people, ‘You shouldn’t think.’  We believe that our Lord greatly valued intelligence, that He always sought to develop it, and did not conceal His disappointment when He had to ask, ‘How is it that ye do net understand?’  We remember that on two occasions He commended the faith of individuals, and that in each case what gave Him pleasure was the power of reasoning displayed, and the quickness to discover analogies.  We like to think that the characteristically English work of Bishop Butler was a continuation of the succession which began with the Roman centurion and the Syro-Phoenician woman.

      One of our London clergy – Mr Boyd, of Knightsbridge – has recently written a pamphlet in which he defines what he conceives to have been the mission of our church since the Reformation.  We may be grateful to him for his words:

      Its peculiar mission is to carry forward into the new age the structural life and thought consolidated in the past, and to adjust it to the progressive purposes of God.  We therefore define the mission of this part of the church to be the presentation to the world of Catholic faith and practice in a form in which it can be intellectually received and used. [Facing Kikuyu, p. 41.]

      Once again, we shall do well to remind ourselves that such a mission can never be an easy task.  We must not be surprised that there are these who find the atmosphere with us too invigorating, and who hanker after a condition of church life where the demands made upon the intellect are fewer, and where the individual is encouraged to hand over his responsibilities to others.  We have most of us read the significant words of one who left us a few years ago, as they are recorded in the sketch of him just published by his brother: ‘He said that the misery of being an Anglican was that it was all so rational – you had to make up your mind on every conceivable point.  “Why not,” he said, “make it up on one point – the authority of the church – and have done with it?”’ [Hugh, by A. C. Benson, p. 132.]

      The English church does undoubtedly make severe demands upon the intelligence of its members.  Perhaps it is true to say that the religious life which it offers is the hardest that is offered by any section of Christendom.  It does not forget that there are babes, but its meat was chiefly intended for growing men and women.  Possibly we ought to be more patient and considerate.  Our Biblical critics, for example, might be wiser if they were less hasty in announcing their sometimes immature proposals and conclusions.  But in believing it to be a duty to ‘prove all things’ in order to ‘hold fast that which is good,’ we are acting in accordance with the spirit of the New Testament and are discharging a function which is of incalculable value in Christendom, however exacting and even painful the process may be.

      We ought to be thankful that our laymen are now encouraged to take divinity degrees, and that our women students are anxious to obtain the archbishop’s diploma.  It will be more than sad if our clergy are so much busied about other things that they are content to yield to others the foremost place in respect of theological learning and religious thought.  Those who are to be our leaders must not be afraid to face this part of our vocation thankfully and with a good courage.  When we are perplexed by new knowledge, when perhaps, for the moment, the very foundations of the faith appear to be endangered, they must strengthen us with the assurance that the shaking can only the more clearly reveal the certainty of that which is to stand fast for ever.  They must teach us to avoid panic and go on with our work, knowing that ‘Truth is great, and it does prevail.’

      And as we must have courage, so also we need the lesson of humility.  We must acknowledge that, as individuals, we may make mistakes, and that our efforts can bear no fruit except in so far as they are directed and controlled by the Spirit, whose office it is to guide those who are willing to learn His way.  When we have understood the most, we must be glad to confess that we are ‘still learning’.

      We have thought of two of the tasks which belong to our special vocation, the task of Freedom and the task of Truth.  There is a third about which it is even more necessary that we should try to see clearly.

      The truth of which we have been thinking has been more particularly intellectual truth; and intellectual truth is, after all, only the form and the semblance of truth.  Beyond it lies the substance without which little is to be gained.  We have therefore still to think of a further attainment towards which we are called to press by our vocation.  There can be little doubt as to how we must define it.  For us the substance of truth is best expressed by the great word Reality.

      We almost shrink from the use of such a word.  Reality in its fullest meaning is a thing that most of us do not care to talk about.  On the present occasion necessity is laid upon us, if we are to understand what is vital and essential in our life and duty.

      No one has completely diagnosed the British character who has not discovered that underneath all surface appearances there is a something that cannot better be described than by calling it a love of reality.  Even those who have denounced us as hypocrites have unintentionally borne a testimony to this, inasmuch as they have charged us with wishing to pass as real.  That is certainly what we should like to appear, and what we do want to be.  Our bluntness of speech and distrust of casuistry; our downrightness and respect for facts; our dislike of over-refined manners and artificiality of address; our suspicion of rhetoric, our very materialism; the satisfaction with which we parade our shortcomings, and our demand for straightforwardness in our public men – these and a thousand more such marks and traits reveal the underlying regard for sincerity in our national character.

      If our church is to continue to be, and is to become in an increasing degree, the Church of England, it must give expression and direction to this wish to respond to reality.  Most assuredly it will never satisfy its own children if it does not.  The experiences of the past supply us with incontestable evidences of this.  Let me recall to your minds one memorable instance which has not always been interpreted as it should be.

      Just seventy years ago, in 1845, an event happened which for the moment threatened to shake if not to shatter the position of the English church.  That was the secession from our Communion of one who had profoundly affected its temper and influenced its tone.  Those who may not know it will be well repaid if they turn to the second volume of ‘Occasional Papers’ by the late Dean Church and read an article which he wrote on the occasion of the death of Cardinal Newman. [Cardinal Newsman’s Course.  Reprinted from The Guardian of August 13, 1890.]  They will find there an account of the motives which actuated his remarkable career.  To say that the article was by Dean Church is to say that it was based upon intimate knowledge, and that it was written with more than ordinary insight, with great generosity, and with admirable taste.  Its aim was to show the underlying unity of purpose which gave consistency to the life of a man who is declared to have had ‘the finest mind in the Church of England.’  The question is asked, What was he seeking that led him to try the various schools of religious thought among us, and then to take the step which separated him from all his friends, and, for a long time, from credit and influence?  This is the answer given: He had a ‘keen and profound sense of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New Testament.’  His sensitive spirit was eagerly searching for anything anywhere that would at all resemble that.  He failed to find it.  ‘He could not see a trace in English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the future, which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form of the New Testament life.’

      He sought it in the church of his childhood, but he was more and more dissatisfied and distressed by what he saw there.  ‘The church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal,’ ‘a willing fellow worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity.’  ‘All this was admirable, but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was that which filled his thoughts.’  At last he felt he must go and pursue the search elsewhere.  After much grief and agony of mind and soul he went.  Others in a similar plight had turned to some Puritan sect in the hope of recovering the earliest and simplest spirituality.  But he had read history too well not to know that a full Christianity could not be maintained apart from the Catholic development of the corporate ideal.  So he turned to what the Dean, with all his gentleness, cannot refrain from describing as ‘the great unreformed Roman Church, with its strange, unscriptural doctrines, and its undeniable crimes, and its alliance, whenever it could, with the world.’  What was it that attracted him?  ‘Two things of which the New Testament was full, and which were characteristic of it – devotion and self-sacrifice.’  He valued its emphasis upon celibacy, its demand for sanctity, its defiance of liberal opinions, its very superstitions.  Seen as he saw it, he thought it ‘the reproduction, partial as it might be, yet real and characteristic, of the life and ways of the New Testament.’

      And what of the result of his search?  He himself said little, if others suggested much.  Dean Church gave his opinion with delicacy and reserve.  There was no admission of failure, nor any desire to retrace his steps, emphatically not that.  But there was ‘a softening in his ways of thought and speech,’ a kinder estimate of what was noble and beneficent ‘in modern civilisation, with an increasing interest in ‘things English.’  ‘He republished his Oxford sermons and treatises.  He prized his honorary fellowship at Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome he met there.  He discerned how much the English church counted for in the fight going on in England for the faith in Christ.’  And then follows a sentence which is most touching and illuminating.  ‘Through all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning for something which was not to be had – a sense, resigned, for so it was ordered, but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us, are from the life of the New Testament.’

      It has seemed worth while to linger over the description of a life for which we might have desired an earlier development of some of its sympathies, and perhaps a greater patience; but which never ceased to bear witness to the deep sense of the need for reality which it had acquired within the borders of the English church.

      Much has happened in the years since Newman left us.  We could hope that much has been changed for the better.  We may be sure that the changes that are to come will be even greater than those which have taken place, if we are as much in earnest as he was to realise the New Testament ideal of faith and fellowship, of reverence, and simplicity, and sacrifice.  Until we do, we ought to be utterly unsatisfied.  And surely if the call was ever insistent it is at this time.  How often have we been told that our soldiers at the Front are being brought face to face with the spiritual reality as never before in their lives!  And how often it has been pressed upon us to remember that when they return, with their unforgettable experiences, they will be struck, yes, and be hurt, by unreality if they find it in our Christianity and in our churches as never before!  There certainly will be no place for a religion that is not real and as we say, ‘experimental’ in the England of the immediate future.  Perhaps we ought to thank God for that.

      That we may not end with generalities, I will ask you to consider briefly, but in some detail, what a determination to be real would mean for us in the ordering of our church life.  In the first place, we shall all agree that if we are to be real we must be Spiritual.  It is the more necessary to lay stress upon this because of the important place which at an earlier stage we assigned to the intellect.  The spiritual is the real.  It is something deeper than the institutional and the intellectual.  We shall need the prophet, as well as the ecclesiastical statesman and the theological teacher.  We shall need to be helped to see the Vision of God.  We shall need to have our hearts lifted to the risen and ascended Lord.  We shall need to be filled with the Holy Ghost.  God be thanked for the increase of retreats, days of devotion, and conventions for the deepening and strengthening of spiritual life.  But how much remains to be done before the church in all its parts is spiritually revived! – when it is, unworldliness will be common and sanctity will have ceased to be rare.

      Next let us say that to be real is to be Practical.  In theory we all value the practical.  We agree with St. James in his insistence upon works, and are ready to accept his definition of religion.  And, on the whole, the English church has wanted to be practical in practice.  But how much is waiting to be attempted – in social reform, in the application of the new knowledge to the improvement of the health and surroundings of the people; for purity, and sobriety, and the righting of remediable wrongs; for the enforcement upon consciences of the command ‘Six days shalt thou labour,’ with its correlative of the observance of a day of spiritual refreshment, of worship and rest.  We have scarcely begun to be practical in finding employment for the spiritual powers of our communicants, in making provision for the training and adequate support of our workers, in raising the reserves and resources that are needed for the work in the mission field.

      We must surely not rest content until every congregation is organised as a permanent practical centre of prayer, and thought, and fellowship, in which the various gifts of men and women, of young and old, of rich and poor, are combined and utilised for the furtherance of Christ’s kingdom in the neighbourhood and beyond it.

      Why have church attendances in so many places diminished?  Why have so many of our more vigorous minds slipped away from our services?  Is it not because to many of them attendances and services have ceased to seem real?  Let it be felt that the aim of the church is first of all to be spiritual, and then to be intensely practical, and we shall not have to complain of lack of response or want of enthusiasm.

      There is a further thing which needs to be added because, strangely enough, we are apt to forget it.  To be real is to be Natural.  No doubt, as a people, we do in a large measure possess ‘that courage in being ourselves’ for which Goethe praised us.  We dislike pose, and pedantry, and pretence.  We prefer what is natural in character, and we hold it to be a sign of the highest genius in art.  And, generally speaking, we are in favour of the natural in religion.  We are repelled by what looks to be affected, and can distinguish between what is spontaneous and genuine, and what is borrowed and secondhand.  It was a thoroughly English temper which prescribed that our religious ceremonies should be such ‘that every man may understand what they do mean, and to what use they do serve.’  In this connexion I would urge with much earnestness that those who try to conform the appearance of our services to modes which are in use abroad would do well to take note of this characteristic of our people.  There is a serious danger lest when attempts are made to accustom them to methods which are not our own, and which at the best we can only imperfectly reproduce, they should be led by their very desire for reality to leave their would-be instructors, in order, as they say, to find the ‘real thing’.  Again and again there have been those who have done this, only to discover by a painful experience that what is not natural can never be real, either here or elsewhere.

      Let us avoid eccentricity, and guard against the defects of our insularity.  Let us not be ashamed to accept what is true from whatever quarter it comes.  But let us not be afraid to be what we are, even if this should involve the reserve and simplicity, which for most Englishmen are indispensable conditions of reverence and strength.

      Others have their work to do; work, it may be, more conspicuous and dazzling than ours.  It is through the fulfillment by us all of our appointed vocations that we shall be led to that final harmony of differentiated unity for which we are earnestly praying.  We may thank our Lord heartily for the part He has assigned to us.  It is not a small thing that we should be called in these days to be Champions of Freedom, Servants of Truth, and Lovers of Reality.  We need only ask besides to be granted the humility and the wisdom and the loyalty which will enable us to be worthy of our calling.

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