Chapter VIII: Part 8

But, after all, these men had higher and harder work on hand than thinking and writing as scholars, and work which the world could less easily spare. Those exiles in Holland, by their toil and their suffering, were nursing and training that spirit which created the American Republic, and which rules it still. The world probably wanted that work just then more than the rarest scholarship; though intellectual power was at a low ebb at that particular crisis in the Anglican Church. And the world found what it supremely wanted, the simplest, purest, toughest, noblest band of colonists ever sent forth from any country. In the rude, rough times which succeeded, the leaders of the great action which settled on a sure basis for ever the liberties of our country, were of the Nonconformist Schools. The men who did such work for England as the conduct of that long and tremendous struggle to its glorious issue, might well be pardoned if their culture were of a poorer type than that of their antagonists. But it is really marvellous how, during the storm of the Civil War, Nonconformist learning and intellectual ability flourished. Lord Brook and Peter Sterry, leading spirits among the Independents, were deeply tinctured with Platonic learning; they drew their large and liberal ideas from a deeper than an Arminian spring. In John Howe strong traces of the same Platonic element may be discovered. There seems to have been a certain native affinity between this young Independency and the thoughts of the great master of ideal philosophy in the ancient world. At the time of the Restoration, probably the most many-sided, variously-accomplished, and masterly man was Richard Baxter. His position in relation to the Church and Nonconformity through the most active part of his career, was not unlike the position which Erasmus held during the Reformation between Protestantism and Rome. But most certainly, despite his views 'on National Churches,' it was mainly from the Nonconformist springs that his life was nourished, and the weight of his influence was thrown practically into the Nonconformist scale.

But perhaps of all the able men who were busy about things theological and political, about the time of the Westminster Assembly, there was not one who thought so freely and wrote so liberally as John Goodwin, the Independent.[37] Far from feeling himself shut up, as we Independents hear that we are shut up, to the traditions of the elders, which were unquestionably strongly Calvinistic, he discerned and grasped whatever good there might be in the Arminian scheme of doctrine; while his views on public affairs, on political and religious liberty, on toleration, on the welfare and progress of states, were more in the key of modern ideas than anything else which is to be met with in the literature of those times. A man must have had a far sight and a brave heart who could write concerning the Scriptures in those days and in such an atmosphere, 'The true and proper foundation of the Christian religion is not ink and paper, not any book or books, not any writing or writings whatsoever, whether translations or originals, but that substance of matter, those glorious counsels of God concerning the salvation of the world by Jesus Christ, which are indeed represented and declared both in the translations and the originals, but are distinct from both.'

Passing on to the midst of the next century, the Nonconformist evangelists of the great Methodist revival were busy in other work than that which occupied the scholars and divines of the not over-earnest or spiritual Georgian Church. But it was more distinctly church work; and it lay far nearer to the heart of the true welfare and progress of the state. The men who established a strong Christian influence over those classes of the population who in times of political ferment are truly the dangerous classes, were mainly Nonconformist. What England owed, socially and politically, to the leaders and ministers of the great Evangelical revival, when the storm of the Revolution swept through Europe, has never been calculated, and never can be. The work of the evangelists among the colliers and miners, and generally among the poorest of the poor, was a grand safeguard to us when our turn of revolutionary trial came. The chief reason why the Revolution in England ran in the main a peaceful and orderly course, while in France it was convulsive and destructive, is to be found in the nexus of the classes which the great Evangelical movement established, and in the gleam of hope which it kindled in the popular heart.

And it is not a little noteworthy that the party in the Church of England which is seeking to repeat, though under widely different, and, as we judge, quite lower forms, the Methodist revival, and is striving hard, and not unsuccessfully, to bring some Christian influence (though many would deny its right to the name) to bear on the vast heathen class in our cities which perplexes and saddens all churches, is that which bears most uneasily the yoke of Establishment, and talks enthusiastically of Disestablishment as emancipation. One of its orators the other day at St. James's Hall, young and enthusiastic, no doubt, but the meeting cheered him to the echo, thus delivered himself: 'Nothing is so fatal as this Establishment, and if the suspension of Mr. Mackonochie should lead to the overturning of that rooks'-nest, so much the better.' (Tumultuous cheering.)

But it may be said, and with a specious colour of truth, that one of the chief virtues of the Establishment principle is, that it comprehends these extreme parties and keeps them under some moderating control. It seems to us that in the past it was entirely for the good of England that the Church did not comprehend the Puritan, the Nonconformist, the Methodist elements. Happily, it was not in the nature of the Church to comprehend them in any sense. Had she been capable of retaining them and subjecting them to her moderating hand, the nation would have lost its ablest leaders, and the Church the most glowing breath of its life. And the best thing that could happen now would be that the High Anglicans should be let alone, to work out in entire freedom their ideas. The State influence lends importance and power to their movement with one hand, while it maddens them by limiting and crippling their freedom of action on the other. There is a spirit working within them which, whether we like it or not, has a definite meaning and purpose, and is destined to become a power. It may be trammelled, cramped, crippled by the action of authority, but it cannot be exorcised or expelled. In the present temper of the public mind, it has a distinct vocation of its own, which it would be well for itself and for the world that it should work out freely. The sooner that it is set perfectly free to try with its own resources what its method is worth, the better for itself, and the better for the people whom it dreams that it can lead and save.

We have spoken casually of the Calvinistic and Arminian creeds. The subject is worthy of some close examination from the point of view of the present article; inasmuch as it is often urged by the advocates of the Establishment, as a strong point in its favour, that the leading Anglican divines of King James and King Charles led the reaction against Calvinism, and made room for Arminian doctrine and influence in the Established Church. It is a point which is urged in the able and temperate article on the Church and Nonconformity which appeared in the last number of the _Quarterly Review_, which, as well as its liberal rival, evidently feels that the question is no longer speculative but practical, and must be dealt with as one of the leading and most pressing public questions of the day. The tone of both those articles is most significant and assuring to Nonconformists. They both recognise most cordially the large service which the free churches of England have rendered to the cause of liberty and progress, though they do not, of course, yet see their way to make the principle of religious freedom supreme in the conduct of our ecclesiastical affairs. Hear the _Quarterly_:--'The sects of Nonconformity have been of great service to English progress; it does not follow from this that it would be a great gain to England if there were nothing but sects in which its religion could take refuge and find expression.' (_Quarterly Review_, No. 260, p. 234.) The change of tone surely is most significant here.

But to return to our immediate subject. King James had no sooner reached England and tested the adulation, so grateful to his coarse, vain nature, with which the Anglican prelates were ready to welcome him, than he discovered that Presbytery agreed with monarchy 'as God agreed with the devil.' Still he was a strong Calvinist, and held the Genevan doctrines in common with Whitgift and the leading doctors of the Anglican Church. He was not without shrewd native wit, and in the Hampton Court Conference, bitter and even brutal as he was to the Puritans, his strong common sense rebelled against the policy which the Bishops would have forced upon him. We owe probably to him that the Lambeth Articles were not incorporated in the formularies of the Church. But before the end of his reign he found that Calvinism agreed with monarchy as ill as Presbytery, and the Church lapsed slowly but steadily, or rose as some may prefer to call it, into Arminian doctrine. But the remarkable thing about the matter is that Calvinism declined and Arminianism rose in favour, just in the measure in which the clergy lent themselves to be ministers of the Court. As matter of history, the vaunted reaction against Calvinism was coincident and consonant with the cry, 'Church and King.' And this opens out an important truth on which it is worth our while for a moment to dwell.

Mr. Froude has recently indulged, in a wild, vigorous way, in a glorification of Calvinism, before an audience whose traditional sympathies, at any rate, must have been strongly on his side. He suggests a pregnant question: How is it that a system which is so terribly dishonouring to the goodness and righteousness of God, should have afforded such an inspiration to some of the very noblest men who have ever left their trace on the history of mankind? He gives a list of great names, noble names, among the noblest of our race; and with regard to most of them, at any rate, the claim or charge of being strongly under the influence of Augustinian ideas of the Divine government cannot be denied. And yet there is something horrible in the picture of the Divine principles and methods of action, which Calvinism in its pure and naked form presents. It is difficult for us to contemplate, without shuddering, the ideas of divine and human things which seem to have been adopted with grim satisfaction by some of the very strongest and most high-minded men who have ever swayed the destinies of the world. How are we to account for it?

Surely the solution of the difficulty is to be found in the fact that the great Calvinists held more vitally to the affirmations than to the negations of their creed. Its bearing on them and their lives, in an age of strong swift action, was the thing of vital personal moment; its bearing on their fellow-men and the universal government of God, though expressed in terribly clear and logical formularies, held a very secondary place in their minds. The grand idea, God's election--man the chosen agent of God, raised up, though all unworthy, for the setting forth of His counsels, and the execution of His will--seized and possessed them wholly; and the outside bearing of the truths, so to speak, appeared but partially to their moral sight. The world was then a great camp, in which the fiercest martial passions were raging. Sections of society, as well as nations, were in chronic and stern antagonism; and it was not so unnatural to regard in those days as reprobate children of the devil those whom it was almost a matter of religious duty to afflict and to destroy. A man easily persuades himself that an enemy is a child of darkness when his sword will soon be at his throat. Terms have changed; but the language and thoughts of the French army and the National Guards in Paris about each other, repeat in substance the relations of Protestant and Romanist, Englishman and Spaniard, Cavalier and Roundhead, in the Elizabethan and Caroline days. The thing appeared to them quite otherwise than to us, who have been studying for ages the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of mankind; a doctrine which, to our shame be it spoken, was first forced on the public notice of peoples by profane and godless writers who laid the train of the first French Revolution.

We need only read the language in which Hawkins or Raleigh utter the thoughts of their hearts about the Spaniards, to comprehend how easy it was for them to regard themselves as elect instruments for the overthrow of the devil and his works, in their daring, but semi-piratical forays into the harbours and the treasure fleets of Spain. Hawkins, with his cargo of slaves on board, crowded so close that fever began to rage among his crew, could hardly have comforted himself so complacently, in the midst of a terrible calm in the tropics, with the thought that 'God never suffers His elect to perish,' unless his whole thought had been occupied with what he was doing against those whom he believed to be ministers of darkness, while his relations and duties to his hapless fellow-creatures were dropped out of sight. Calvinism easily inspires men, that is, the larger sort of men, who are capable of the inspiration, with the sense of a Divine call to a Divine service, and it makes them sharp as flint and hard as iron in working out their mission. And these great Protestants and Puritans in the age of the struggle for life saw, partly, no doubt, through prejudiced eyes, so much moral foulness in those with whom they were contending, that reprobation did not seem so dread a doctrine in their sight as it seems in ours; who sit down calmly, after the great battle is over, to think out the system in all its bearings, and to examine its principles in the light of modern cosmopolitan sympathy and charity. To us much of it seems simply revolting, and we marvel how it could ever have commended itself as of God, as it unquestionably did commend itself, to some of the wisest, noblest, and most merciful of our race.

The Calvinism of the Reformers, as a body, is of course unquestionable. Even Whitgift, bitterly as he hated, and hard as he struck the Puritans, shared their profoundest convictions as theologians, as the Lambeth Articles fully reveal. So long as the battle with Rome was a life and death struggle, that is, through the whole reign of Elizabeth, Calvinistic ideas strung the courage and energy of the chief actors to the keenest tension. When the Church had won its position, and was settling down into a respectable institution, one of whose chief functions seemed to be to sustain the dogma of the divine right of kings, then the Arminian bed was made ready for it; and most of the chief actors in the next stage of the drama in which the Church was the main prop of the monarchy, leaned strongly to the Arminian side. The men, on the other hand, who had to fight the battle of liberty--liberty of body, liberty of thought, liberty of spirit--against all the force which the world of authority could bring to bear against them, were Calvinist to the backbone. God's elect they held themselves to be, weak, unworthy instruments, by whom He was yet pleased to manifest His glory, and to accomplish His will. And this was the backbone of their strength, '_'Not I, but the grace of God which is in me._'

It may well be questioned whether anything weaker than this sense of a personal call, a personal inspiration, to which the Calvinist readily opened his soul, could have borne the conquerors through that tremendous struggle which assured the liberties of Englishmen forever, first against the spiritual tyrant at Rome, next against the domestic tyrant on the throne of their own realm. Perhaps the Puritan struggle against episcopal and regal tyranny, which brought the Independents to the front, was the sternest ever fought out in the world. The best measure of the grandeur of Cromwell's proportions is to be found in the measure of the men whom he ruled. The English under Elizabeth proved themselves, in the Narrow Seas, on the Spanish Main, amid Arctic ice, and all around the world, the most masterful race upon earth. The spirit had not died out in the Caroline days. The Puritan party nursed its traditions and cherished its fire, as, among other significant signs, these words of Pym reveal:--'Blasted may that tongue be, that in the smallest degree shall derogate from the glory of those halcyon days which our fathers enjoyed during the government of that ever-blessed, never-to-be-forgotten, royal Elizabeth.'

The struggle within the bosom of such a nation demanded powers of the highest and strongest order, and drew them forth. And the man who could conduct that struggle to a successful issue and rule such a strong-handed, imperious race as the English of the Commonwealth, could have found little beyond his strength in any enterprise in any age of the world; and nothing but that spirit which from the positive side of their Calvinistic creed entered into Cromwell, and the men of whom he became the organ and the head, could have borne them through the tremendous pressure. No 'sweetness and light' of intellectual culture, no sense of 'natural human power' could have borne John Robinson's company of pilgrims first to Holland, and then across the stormy Atlantic, and given them strength to hold together, as they say of themselves touchingly, 'in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience; and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves strictly tied to all care for each other's good, and of the whole by every, and so mutual.'--(Letter of Robinson and Brewster to Sir E. Sandys.) It was this spirit, which no conformity to an Elizabethan, still less to a Jacobean church, could have nurtured, which made New England, and through New England made America.

Calvinism was so profoundly associated through that age with the advancing cause of the spiritual and political liberties of our country that the Arminian bias of the dignified clergy of the Establishment, which began to manifest itself after the settlement of the Church and the kingdom under King James, is by no means a noble or beautiful feature in its history. Arminianism in the Church went hand in hand with worldly compliance, slavish homage to princes, idolatrous rites, gorgeous ritual, and episcopal tyranny; and it went down with the Church righteously to ruin under the shock of the men who did believe themselves called, quickened, and raised up as witnesses, by the God of righteousness and truth.

We look too little at these doctrinal developments in the light of the political life of the times which produce them. The connection is a profound one between schemes of doctrine and political ideas. A point too little considered is the truth of a scheme of doctrine for its times. They must be blind indeed who cannot see that with the Calvinistic Puritans, and not with the Arminian Anglicans, rapidly tending to the Laudian Church, were stirring through the whole of that struggle the motive forces of the progress of society.

But the question now arises, and it is the central point of this discussion of the genius of Nonconformity in its relation to the progress of society, What is this affirmation of Nonconformity which has made it in all ages a factor of supreme importance in the culture and development of mankind? It stands as a witness against the State organization of Christianity, but that is not its strength. Not what it stands against, but what it stands for, is the secret of its power. Briefly, then, it witnesses for the ancient historic and Christian idea of the Church, as the manifestation and the organ of the Spirit working freely in individual consciences and hearts. It is Nonconformity which truly inherits and cherishes the legacy of early and mediæval Christian society, which the Roman organization of Christendom did its best to destroy. Throughout the whole of the Mediæval period the true development of the Church was carried on, not on the basis of authority, or by the application of accepted doctrines and methods, but by the original energetic action of individual men and the disciples whom they might gather round them, who brought new ideas into the Church, and leavened it with their own independent life. The antagonism of constituted Church authorities to all the leaders of new modes of Christian activity and development, is precisely parallel to the treatment which original men of genius in all ages have met with at the hand of the constituted authorities of society. The young monasticism had to fight its way desperately into the hallowed sphere of Church organization. 'It is the ancient advice of the Fathers,' says Cassianus, 'advice which endures, that a monk at any cost must fly bishops and women.' And the bishops repaid the antipathy with interest. The struggles of the monks and bishops in the West, in the sixth and seventh centuries, form the most interesting and pregnant chapter of their ecclesiastical history. The monks had to fight hard for their independence, and to fight their way into influence. But no intelligent student of the history of that period, we imagine, can doubt that the higher life and aim of the Church was on the whole more fully represented in the irregular than in the regular line.

How far such a man as St. Bernard was in his day a Nonconformist, would be an interesting subject to discuss. Champion of orthodoxy as he was, and maker of Popes, his position was far more like that of the Puritan in the Anglican Church of King James than at first sight appears. But the discussion of this question would lead us too far out of the direct line of our argument. What hard work St. Francis had to wring recognition for himself and his tattered mendicant company from Pope Innocent III., great and far-seeing man as he was, is well known to all students of Mediæval history. And yet St. Francis and holy poverty for the time saved the Church. Though the mendicant orders soon grew fearfully corrupt, and made the Reformation doubly imperative, yet their brief career of purity and power added, it is not too much to say, two centuries to the life of the Roman system, and staved off the Ecclesiastical Revolution till the Western nations were full-grown, and were strong enough to use nobly the freedom which they might win. The life of the Church has been cherished, and its influence has been fed in all ages, by men who drew fresh ideas, fresh inspiration, from the life of the Saviour as set forth in the Divine Word. And the Mediæval Church had room for them. There was nothing out of tune with its professed organization in this direct appeal to the fountain head of truth. It could include its Nonconformists, and find room and work for them; though it had but a dim eye to distinguish between its Nonconformists and its heretics, and was prone to harry the last with fearful brutality,--a brutality which would be blankly incomprehensible, for they were often far from brutal men who exercised it, but for the idea which filled the minds of Churchmen, that heresy was the spawn of hell. When the Catholic Church, like the Anglican in after ages, was unable to comprehend its Nonconformists, could only cast out its Luthers, as Anglicanism cast out its Barrowes, its Robinsons, its Baxters, its Whitfields, it ceased to be Catholic and became Roman, and all the living energy of the Church, and all its promise, passed over to the opposite side.

A church like the Anglican, in which its judges of doctrine confess frankly that really they have nothing to do with Scripture or with truth in settling Church controversies, but simply with the legal, and, therefore, we freely allow, the liberal construction of certain documents settled by the legislative authority of the State centuries ago, would have been regarded with simple horror by the great Mediæval Churchmen, on whose limited views of things we somewhat loftily look down. The belief did then survive in the Church that the Spirit of the Lord is a free Spirit; and that the Church is constituted, not by documents, but by the perpetual presence and manifestation of that Spirit, though it came at last to believe that He dwelt in a shrine so narrow and foul as the Roman Court. This idea the Anglican Church has deliberately renounced, while the Nonconformists have upheld it. The constitution of the Establishment is distinctly not by the Spirit, but by the letter of legal documents; and those in whom the Spirit stirs new energies, and moves to new agencies, have no choice but to pass outside her pale.

The great churchmen of Mediæval Christendom--Benedict, Boniface, Dunstan, Anselm, Bernard, Francis--would have found themselves not out of tune with the Independent, John Robinson, when he said to his pilgrims as he sent them forth, that he

'miserably bewailed the state and condition of the Reformed
Churches who were come to a period in religion, and would
go no further than the instruments of their reformation.
As, for example, the Lutherans, they could not be drawn to
go beyond what Luther saw; for whatever part of God's will
he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin they will
rather die than embrace it. And so also you see the
Calvinists, they stick where he left them--a misery much to
be lamented; for though they were precious shining lights
in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to
them; and were they now living, they would be as ready and
willing to embrace further light as that which they had
received. I beseech you to remember it, it is an article of
your Church Covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever
truth shall be made known unto you from the written Word of
God.'... 'I am very confident the Lord hath more truth yet
to break forth out of his holy word.'[38]--_Robinson's
Farewell Address to the Pilgrims._

But we think that these great Churchmen would have found themselves entirely out of tune with the ablest doctors who should seek to settle the faith on the basis of legal authority, and whose Church courts could give no dispensation to the word of the Bible, or the illumination of the Spirit, to move men to think and speak in the Church otherwise than it had been determined that they should think and speak three centuries ago. We hear much of historic Churches. It is, we believe, Mr. Arnold's term. The writer of the very able and liberal article in the current number of the _Edinburgh Review_ adopts the term with high approval, and sustains Mr. Arnold's argument against us, that by separation we cut ourselves off from history. We answer that the Church of England made a new thing in history at the Reformation,--a poor, base image of a Divine idea; while the Nonconformists maintain and cherish the traditions of history, and are in full tune with all that has been deepest and strongest in the life of Christendom, in holding fast this liberty, to watch for, to entertain, and to reflect, the 'fresh light that is ever breaking forth from the word of God.' It was the Article of the Church Covenant of the Pilgrims, it is in our Church Covenant still, and it will remain in our Church Covenant while Independency endures.

And herein our Church Covenant is at war with the idea which Sir Roundell Palmer developed briefly, in his able and earnest argument for establishment in the debate on Mr. Miall's motion. His speech was probably the ablest which was delivered on his side of the question. He seemed to think that there was a certain fixity in religious truth, which offers a strong contrast to the continually progressive character of scientific truth, and which renders Establishment a more feasible thing in relation to religion than it would be in relation to truths belonging to the continually shifting and expanding scientific sphere. There can be no question, we imagine, that this idea of fixity possessed the minds of the men who created the Anglican formularies, and is behind the defence of their integrity which a powerful party in the Church so strenuously maintains. Some of the ablest and most loyal of English Churchmen hold firmly this finality doctrine; indeed it is the only logical justification of the subscription which has hitherto been the imperative demand of the Church. Lord Bacon's remarks on this point are interesting and important. He presses the question, 'Why the civil state should be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made every three or four years by Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as time breedeth mischief; and contrariwise the Ecclesiastical Estate should still continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no attention now for these five and forty years and more?' With Bacon in his question stand Greenwood, Barrowe, Ainsworth, Robinson, Jacob, and the long line of Nonconformists; while the principle of finality has ruled in all ages the policy of the National Church, and has been decisively and even vehemently expressed at critical periods of its history. New adjustments of doctrinal belief establish themselves within the Anglican pale; but it is by doing violence to the fundamental principle on which the Church is founded, for it is unquestioned in our ecclesiastical courts that the Articles of Religion were intended to fix the form of truth to be developed in the teaching of the Church of England so long as that Church should endure.

But there is a complete confusion in this notion between the subject matter of theology and the modes of its manifestation in the forms of human thought. In the sense in which theology takes its place among the creations of the human intellect, the highest, the noblest, the most influential on the culture of mankind, it is subject to movement and progress like the rest. Because the science of divine things has been treated systematically as a fixed form of truth, capable of at any rate approximately complete expression in the propositions which form the creeds of the Church; because the measures of bygone centuries are rigidly applied, and all excursion of the reason beyond their logical pale is treated with stern repression, theology has fallen from the upper heaven of man's intellectual sphere, and grovels weakly and painfully in the dust. Theology learns nothing and forgets nothing, like the Bourbons; and, like the Bourbons, she has fallen out of the march of the world. There is no province of human thought about which men so shrug their shoulders as about theology.

We believe that those champions of the Church of England who glory in their formularies, as containing and maintaining the 'form of sound words once delivered to the saints,' and who regard them as the strongest bulwarks of the truth, are glorying in her weakness. She has followed systematically the policy against which the great Founder of the empire of modern thought so energetically protested. She suffers no revision, no readjustment, except by tricks of interpretation which fill timid men with distress and honest men with shame. And yet readjustment is imperative. Theology, in the very nature of things, must progress with the progresses of the world or fall out of its march. The connection is a profound one, as we have said, between the secular life of an age and its religious beliefs. The history of the growth of the Augustinian, the Calvinistic, and the Arminian theologies is profoundly interesting, when studied in the light of the vital secular movements of the ages which gave them birth. The present collapse of the Augustinian theology has its springs distinctly in the secular sphere. Because the world has been progressing so rapidly, enlarging its views of all things around it, searching out the secrets of nature and of man, theology must move on or perish. And, in truth, in no province of human thought and life is there stronger fermentation; spirit working out new forms of expression and action, and working so strongly that the old vessels of the State creed can contain it no longer; they must be unbound, or it will burst them to pieces. The belief of this age about God, man's relation to God, God's work for man, God's way in the government of the world, demands readjustment quite as much as the biography, the chemistry, the geology which our fathers handed down to us; and the idea that this new spirit must be made to let theology alone, that theology is too sacred, too settled in a fixed form by a Divine hand, to be capable of progress or expansion, is the nurse of atheism and the mother of despair.

But it seems to us that a State Churchman, to be entirely consistent, is bound to maintain this as the fundamental principle of the constitution of his Church. Room for vital growth and progress cannot be afforded openly without involving the destruction of the whole system. The ultimate test is not the word of truth or the mind of the Spirit, but the construction, more or less liberal, and this is largely a matter of accident, of formal, and on some points narrowly dogmatic documents, formulated in the heat of intense controversy three centuries ago. We recognise fully and cordially rejoice in the progress of belief which the thinkers and writers of the Anglican Church have practically secured, in spite of their bonds. There is no little truth, to our shame be it spoken, in the boast which is often on their lips, that the progress of theology in our generation is due far more largely to the labours of Anglican than of Nonconformist divines.

But the reason of this does not lie in our system; it was founded in freedom, and to maintain and develop freedom; it lies in our own weak, timid, and faithless hearts. But the very fact of the large development of liberal ideas, of an expansive and progressive theology in the Anglican Church, must surely call not only serious but decisive attention to the miserably uncertain and insufficient basis on which it rests. There is nothing broader and firmer for an Anglican of the liberal school to rest upon than the chance of a liberal interpretation of stringent articles, by a court the composition of which is always changing, the most influential member of which is the State officer, who has risen to the proud pre-eminence of the first lay subject in the realm by the arts and services of legal and political life. A latitudinarian chancellor, a Gallio, it may be, 'caring for none of these things'--not but that Gallio was in his day and with his duties quite right--may pronounce a judgment which fills one great party in the Church with dismay, and strains the system nigh to bursting on that side. A pious and conscientious chancellor may, by another judgment, strain the system as strongly on the other. But recently the pious and able Lord Hatherley pronounced a judgment, in which he laid down certain propositions concerning the penal character of the sufferings of Christ, which led to much searching of heart, and a great deal of anxious correspondence, before it could be settled whether with a good conscience the Broad Churchman could remain in the Church if the dicta of the Voysey judgment were to be accepted as law. And these swayings on one side or the other are pure matter of accident. A Dean of the Arches with one bias gives offence to one party, a Dean with another bias offends equally their opponents. And Churchmen are kept in constant and painful uncertainty as to the authoritative decisions which may at any moment be laid down on matters which they feel to be of supreme, of sacred importance, and on which they believe that a man, rather than be untrue to his own convictions, should be prepared to die.

It appears to us that this growing freedom in the Church, the fact of which we gladly recognise, is revealing, by the new decisions which it is constantly challenging, the miserably narrow and uncertain basis on which this boasted culture and liberty rest. What progress the advance of society compels Church teachers to make is made in violation of the fundamental pact on which the community rests; and it seems to be inevitable that sooner or later this fact will become so glaring, that the attempt to maintain the articles of religion in face of the opinion of Churchmen will be abandoned in very shame.

So much the better, many broad Churchmen will say. The articles are the skeleton of a dead theology, it would be well if it were buried out of sight. Not so, say Sir R. Palmer and the great body of zealous Churchmen whom he represents so ably. And of the rest--the synagogue of the Libertines, we might call them--we may surely say that a Church in which all sorts of opinions are endowed and invested with such sanction and influence as a State establishment can impart, would become in time more like a synagogue of Satan than a Church.

We contend, then, strenuously for an _honest_ liberty of thought, bounded only by the broad limits of Scripture and the teachings of the Holy Ghost; and we hold that it is only possible to realize it under our independent conditions. The attempt to square the free movements of the Christian mind of the community with the legal construction of ancient Church documents must grow increasingly impracticable, and in the end hateful to all upright, earnest, truth-loving souls.

But it is not as the minister to the intellectual progress of the community, though the progress of an age is never secure until it is keyed by its theology, that the genius of Nonconformity has rendered the most conspicuous service to the world. Its great mission in all ages has been to care for the purity and intensity of the spiritual life of society. Power to live in holier, closer fellowship as Christians, to make the Church more like what Christ meant it to be, and through the Church the world, has been the one thing which Nonconformists have striven to secure by separation, and to cherish for the help and salvation of mankind. They have done much for the light of divine truth; they have done more for the life of God in society. It may be said of them with a truth of which Lucretius little dreamed, noble dreamer as he was--

'Et quasi cursores vitäi lampada tradunt.'

And to estimate this fairly we must turn again to the past, to the _fons et origo_ of our power.

The English Reformation differed in one most essential point, be it for good, be it for evil, from all the other Reformations of Europe. It was distinctly a constitutional movement, carried out from the commencement to the close by the constituted authorities of the land. It was not forced on the rulers by a burst of popular enthusiasm, stirred by some great preacher; nor on the other hand, and on this point we often do it scant justice, was it forced by the rulers on a careless or unwilling people. In the first and second Parliaments of Elizabeth, the House of Commons was far in advance both of the Lords and of the Queen. It was fairly the movement of the nation acting through its political organs. Hence it had a character of compromise here in England which it bore nowhere abroad. Various interests had to be conciliated, as is inevitable in government under a mixed constitution like ours. The laggards had to be thought of as well as the vanguard. Catholics as well as Puritans had to be considered in every bill that was passed through Parliament; and thus our cumbrous incoherent Church system, the child of policy and compromise, was shaped and grew.

This method was the parent of many miserable evils. The monarchical and aristocratic influence was altogether too potent. Had the House of Commons under Elizabeth been free to carry out its judgment, a Church might have grown up pure, noble, beautiful, compared with the present, and might have spared the nation some of the sorest pains of Nonconformity. A hint of what might have been possible we see in the curious account of the Church at Northampton in 1571; and still more perfectly in the first draft of the Constitution of the Hessian Church. But then the result would have been gained most probably, and none knew it better than Elizabeth, at the cost of a tremendous and premature civil war. The key of Elizabeth's policy, and the secret of the great work which she accomplished, was that beyond even Cecil she was a national politician. But on the whole, and in the long run, we are bound to confess that the evils were not without at any rate some counterbalancing advantages. It is always thus with all great human institutions and movements. More or less of evil mingles with the good in all of them; and even in those in which the evil seems largely to preponderate, there are always some elements of blessing to be set in the opposite scale.

Now this feature of our English Reformation has had one remarkable result. Being essentially a compromise, a concession to parties on this side and on that; being the fruit, not of the toil and travail of our most spiritual men, but of the politic judgment, of the average intelligence and spiritual life of the community, the purer spirits, the men of the higher order, touched with the diviner fire, were from the very first driven into opposition. Instead of resting in the movement and ruling it, they found that it stopped miserably short of what they believed to be practicable, and were sure was right. The foremost men of the nation in point of spiritual insight and power from the first were discontent, and then, as time wore on, malcontent, through the earlier days of the Puritan struggle; and then, when time brought no reform, but rather tightening of bonds, they were constrained to become Separatists. A pure and intense, if not powerful, Nonconformist party began to organize itself, of whose life and aims in the early days we could say much did our space allow, which, sealing its testimony with its tears and its blood, handed down its sacred legacy to succeeding generations. We owe it to the special constitution of the Anglican Church, the method of whose growth we have glanced at, that in all generations since the Reformation there has been a considerable, earnest, enthusiastic body of Christian men and women in England devoted to the cause of political and ecclesiastical reform.

This state of things, the coincidence of political and ecclesiastical tyranny on the one side, and of political and ecclesiastical Nonconformity on the other, due to the special organization of the National Church, has had two notable and benign results. It has identified the spiritual and the secular progress of society in England. With us the great political questions fell early into spiritual hands. The men who sympathized with the 'Millenary Petition,' were the men who commenced under James the Parliamentary struggle which was conducted to a triumphant issue under Charles. And if we contrast our own revolutionary struggles with the French, the last--dare we say the last?--the ghastliest, and most horrible act of which is but now complete, we shall estimate the full significance of the fact which we have noted. Then, and not less important, it has kept our best and most earnest men constantly in opposition--in the wilderness as it were, voices crying in the desert--whereby the purest life of the nation has been kept free from the corruption which never fails to attend on worldly prosperity and power. Thus it has been able to preserve its life pure, its light intense, to illumine the darkness and enlighten the dulness of the whole community.

We hear much of what the culture of the Church has done for Nonconformity; and we gladly acknowledge it. We hear less of what the life of Nonconformity has done for the Church. The balance of the exchange would show the largest debt, the debt of life, due to the Nonconformist side.

And this great Nonconformist party has been in all generations the salt of our national life, politically as well as spiritually. The resistance of the seven Bishops to the despotic tolerating edict of King James, is often quoted by Church writers as a noble contribution of the Establishment to the cause of political liberty; and justly, though the Non-jurors must be set in the opposite scale. But we cannot but think of the nobler Nonconformists, persecuted and ground down, to whom the edict would have offered a door of escape from grievous ills, but who stood with the party of resistance, because they cared more for the liberty of the nation than for their own welfare, and preferred to suffer still if the constitutional liberties of England might thereby be sustained. This despised and persecuted band has at the critical moment ruled our revolutions, it has kindled our revivals, it has won and watched our liberties. By the stimulus it has afforded, and the confidence it has created, it has saved us the tremendous catastrophes, the cataclysms, through which alone progress has won its way in less favoured countries. And this is one of the high elements of our happy estate as a people, which we owe incidentally--no thanks, however, to the founders of the Establishment--to the special form which the Reformation assumed in England, and to the organization of our national Church.

Whether the incidental good has or has not been counterbalanced by the very grave and palpable evils which our establishment of religion generated, we have no time here to consider. But a comparison of the actual state of religion, the vigour and vitality of the religious life in England at this moment, with that of Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and Switzerland,[39] where we should say that the Reformation had at once freer course than in England and more decisive results, may suggest the question whether, looking at the matter on a large scale, and through a long day, the loss is altogether on our side.

Now, it is just this Nonconformist element, this light, this leaven, as we contend, of our national life for ages, which it is proposed by an able and influential party to bring into the national Establishment, making it thereby partaker of the fatness of the olive tree of the State Church. But if our argument is worth anything, it is just the missing this through all these ages which has been its salvation. Bring it in, make it rich and powerful, give it State props and stays, and you will rob it of all that makes its life so pungent and stimulating, and will rob the nation thereby of an element which nothing else can supply, and which it would most surely miss. Endow it, and write over its temple, 'Ichabod: The Lord has left it, the glory is gone.'

But why should it be so? Here we approach the core of the controversy between ourselves and the ablest and most liberal of our opponents, with a glance at which we shall conclude. It may be said, and is said, by the broadest of the advocates of Establishment: This spirit has done its work as Nonconformist, and done it bravely; but in that form its work is done. The time is come, we are told, when it should leave the wilderness and enter the pale of society, to work from within, inside the legal pale, at the building up of the Christian State. Surely, it is urged, there is something unhealthy in the life of a community when so much that is purest and most intense is Nonconformist; the more it can be brought in, the better manifestly for the State. On this point the real controversy with those of our opponents whom we most respect and sympathize with, hinges; and it can only be dealt with by opening a yet deeper question, out of which the true answer must come. In such a world as this, the purest spirit, the spirit of Christ, must always to a large extent be Nonconformist. It was so with the Patriarchs, it was so with the Judges, it was so with the Prophets, it was so with the Lord, it was so with the Apostles, it was so with the founders of the great Orders, it was so with all the chief leaders of Reformations and Revivals, who at critical moments have brought salvation for a nation or for the world.

And it must be so, at least, until some far off millennial day. Perfect amalgamation of elements is not possible in a world constituted like this. Unity of form, a visible body comprehending all the higher movements of the life of society, is a thing we may dream of, but shall never see. Just as spirit and flesh keep up an interior antagonism, and progression is possible only through this inward conflict, so there must be this interior discord in every human political society; and its progress will be realized by the action on its mass, its material, of some finer spirit, which must in some measure dwell apart, feeding its life from a diviner spring.

And this separation is the reverse of isolation. 'In the world, not of the world,' is the Christian rule, and it is the very opposite of that of the ascetic. It is the glory of England that there is the freest opportunity for the play of the influence of the smaller communities, which are held together by some special sympathies and beliefs, on the great community at large. And now at last the nation, by opening the Universities, has allowed to these communities the fullest advantages for the culture of their own individual life. It appears to us, to sum up the argument, that the subjection of the free Christian spirit, which seeks and strives to gather light and inspiration continually in fellowships which rest on the word of truth and watch for the guidance of the Spirit, to the regimen of legal authority, just destroys that in it which makes it mordant to the lust and the selfishness of the world around it, that which has been kept in comparative purity through all these ages by being Nonconformist, and which will remain Nonconformist, or, at any rate--for when there is no Church there can be no Nonconformity--will remain free with the freedom which reigns where the Spirit of the Lord is, while the world endures.

No doubt it is at first sight a fair vision, this inclusion of all decently orderly and decently Christian ministries in the land within one pale of order and law: one service, one liturgy, one recognised ministry, one administration of ordinances, throughout the whole country,--the whole people taught out of the same books, at the same time, and by men who have the same claim to their attention, until the nation, in the visible uniformity of its religious acts and expressions, presents a fair image of one visible Church. But it is a mere _mirage_, a mocking image, no more. The kind of spiritual order which would grow up under such conditions would be deathlike and not lifelike; and the visible uniformity could be maintained only by the strong repression of all that makes the life and progress of a Church.