Chapter XXIX: Transformations of Religious Thought

The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated
by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization
of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of
Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures
illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and
abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant
and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the
Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In
the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly
critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on
the new High Church critics, _e.g._ _Lux Mundi_ and _The Sermon on the
Mount_.

A verger at St Mary's Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without, at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human knowledge. Hence nothing in agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to, need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes no proselytes.[107]

Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich. The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been largely due to the influence of the Court. From the _entourage_ of the later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof. Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have shared the fate of continental crowns.

The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation's religious life naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble's Assize Sermon five years before the Queen's accession. Its full results were not to be seen till 1846.

Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declared _Essays and Reviews_ heretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so, to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no binding power. But the days when the _Times_, long since convinced of its Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as 'a clerical debating society with a long name' are altogether gone by.

Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus, during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers' marriages, marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to be of some use in officially telling Parliament men the opinion of the Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation, on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective action.

What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision, have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less successfully than the attack from without.

The parochial system of the Church--its clergy resident in every village where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage, private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape of lands, tithes, other rent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a sum of L5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of L181,940.

The second of the two Acts establishing the Ecclesiastical Commission is of Victorian date. The operations of this body have increased the incomes of Church livings by L1,016,775 a year, or by a capital sum of L30,599,100; and this during the twelve years ending 1896-97. Queen Anne's bounty does not, indeed, seem to have been uniformly administered with such wisdom. Its funds have sometimes been granted to incumbents to enlarge houses, schools, and other buildings beyond the point at which there was an assured income for the maintenance of these fabrics. The Tithes Commutation Act is not blamed for the periodical return of hard times for the clergy. The distress itself is partial, sometimes exaggerated. Still, there seems to have been a general reduction of incomes in rural districts by 25 per cent. No offertories, which in towns greatly help the clergy, can make the country deficiency good. The suggestion of repealing the Act which put down pluralities so as to concentrate several poor preferments in one incumbent is not likely to be acted on. But some relaxation of the Act might be a feasible concession to a growing opinion. Rich livings are sometimes the worst served. Some re-adjustment of stipends after a new enquiry seems, therefore, likely to be proposed.

So much for the purely English aspect of clerical activity in our age. The alliance in the foreign enterprise of the Church with the State coincides exclusively with the Victorian reign. In 1841 the Colonial Bishopric fund was begun. By 1851 the Colonial episcopate was fairly organized. Four years after the Queen's accession there were 10 Anglican dioceses out of England. Sixty years after that accession there are 92.[108] These sees are grouped into provincial Synods. This foreign Church, one in doctrine with the Established Church at home, is modified in its agency and development to suit the soil to which it is transplanted. The late Sir J. R. Seeley, with respect to its calming influences amid jarring faiths, has in a familiar passage dwelt on the Christianity of the English Church as a reconciling element between the rival creeds of the Eastern world. Add to this the organization of episcopal Protestantism of the Anglican type, not only in the West Indies and in our Canadian Dominion, but in the United States themselves.[109]

A fair idea may thus be formed of the State Church in its character of a veritable catholic, not less than a national, power. Improved organization does not always argue increased efficiency. The machinery of the Roman Empire was never more elaborate than when it was in a state of atrophy. Coinciding, however, with the unmistakable signs of spiritual life at home and abroad, the domestic resources and the foreign work of the national religion are tributes alike to the efficacy of the Church as a world-wide instrument of righteousness, and to the increased motive power of religion during the Victorian age. With the spiritual work that has been done, certain names very briefly must be associated. The Oxford Tractarianism between 1832-46 is only one of many manifestations of religious life which mark that epoch, and which nearly perplexed into infidelity the Oxford verger aforesaid. In extreme Evangelicalism outside our Church, the followers of Wesley, regardless of their founder's injunction not to form a separate sect, were perfecting their system when the reign began. In 1833, an English clergyman at Plymouth, J. L. Darby, left the National Church and founded the sect of 'Brethren' who take their name from the Western seaport where he had officiated. Fifteen years later, in 1848, Plymouth Brethrenism was itself divided by one of Darby's followers, named Newton; he created a clique of his own now called by their rival religionists, the loose, or open, Brethren. The missionary and literary activities of this little sect are really remarkable. In 1843 Presbyterianism across the Tweed had a schism of its own. The secession of Chalmers on the issue of State patronage resulted in the founding of the Free Kirk. The religious activity of the epoch has been universal. Among the older dissenting bodies, Congregationalists, in point of numbers, influence, in national repute of their leaders, perhaps come first. These in 1837, numbered 170,000 full members. Now they number nearly 400,000. Of the Baptists there were, in 1837, 125,000. Sixty years later they are 340,000. This increase is due to the single agency of C. H. Spurgeon, whose personal influence is not yet fully realized but may be judged from the circulation by millions of his posthumous Sermons, as well as by the pulpit imitations of him in all Communions, not excepting the high Anglican pulpits. Hence of course Nonconformist numbers depending largely on individual attractions, are subject to greater fluctuations than in the Establishment. Roman Catholics have increased in the large towns of England and in the Colonies. In 1837 their priests were less than 1,000. Fifty years later they were in round numbers 2,500. Their Churches have risen from 600 to 1,350. The activity of British Evangelicalism is farther shown by the doubling of the income of the British and Foreign Bible Society during the reign, by the cost of a New Testament being ten-pence in 1837, a penny in 1897. Similarly the income of the Propagation of the Gospel Society is very nearly twice, and of the Church Missionary Society almost thrice, as much to-day as it was in the Accession year.

Among Nonconformist bodies, numbers vary according to the eminence of individual leaders, rising by bounds with a Spurgeon, diminishing temporarily with some of his successors. Similarly, among Anglican Communicants numbers fluctuate according to the influence of the leaders of the great schools, a Liddon, or a Ryle, a Maurice, a Webb Peploe, or a Lefroy. R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, whose work on the Atonement is a recognised text book, even among many Anglicans, did as much as A. P. Stanley of Westminster, to soften down sectarian differences, and to command the respect of other Communions. Nor has Dale had any lack of worthy successors now living. Unless religion had been ineradicable in the national, because in the human, mind, results very different from this general increase in the number of all religious Communions, judged by whatever test, would have been witnessed.

Scarcely had the Church recovered from the shock of Newman's secession, and the agitating effects during two decades of High Church and Low Church controversies[110] when Dr Mansel, then an Oxford tutor and professor,[111] in his ardent, but not wholly discreet zeal, expressed views on the relations of the Infinite to the finite which, as F. D. Maurice perceived, declaring the Deity to be unknowable by man, might be perverted into an apology for agnosticism. That religion did not really suffer is due in some degree to Benjamin Jowett. This good and honest scholar's life was spent in educating young men into useful Christians, into serious citizens, and into sincere believers. He claimed liberty; he loved truth. He ridiculed with quiet satire the religious nescience and despair which Mansel's terrific propaganda had been distorted into making the vogue. When Dr Temple was made Primate:--the first and greatest tribute was paid to the variety of Oxford ecclesiasticism that would be rightly described not as the broad, or high, but as the hard Church. There could be no more striking instance of the transformation in religious ideas witnessed during our age than the fact that the volume to which Dr Temple and Mr Jowett both contributed, _Essays and Reviews_, was branded by Convocation as heretical during the sixties, and is discovered to be harmless during the nineties.

So qualified a judge on these matters as Mr Stopford Brooke deplores the declension of religious liberalism into something indistinguishable from unbelief. But as Professor Mansel's orthodox zeal for the dignity of his faith helped his enemies rather than his friends, so the services rendered by his devout successors are not always unmixedly conducive to the old faith. The 'higher criticism' has been a dubious ally of Biblical Christianity. _Lux Mundi_ distinguished between the historic and mythic elements in the _Pentateuch_. The gifted editor of that work has more recently[112] applied the same method to the sayings of the Founder of Christianity, and has seemed to some to sanction the evaporation into proverbs of some Divine utterances.[113]