Chapter X: Matters Ecclesiastical. (1864-1868)

ὦ γῆς ὄχημα κὰπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν,
ὅστις ποτ᾽ εἶ σύ, δυστόπαστος εἰδέναι,
Ζεὺς, εἴτ᾽ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν,
προσηυξάμην σε; πάντα γὰρ δι᾽ ἀψόφου
βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ᾽ ἄγεις.

—EUR., _Troades_, 884.

O thou, upholder of the earth, who upon earth hast an abiding
place, whosoever thou art, inscrutable, thou Zeus, whether thou be
necessity of nature, or intelligence of mortal men, on thee I
call; for, treading a noiseless path, in righteousness dost thou
direct all human things.

I

The reader will have surmised that amidst all the press and strain in affairs of state, Mr. Gladstone’s intensity of interest in affairs of the church never for an instant slackened. Wide as the two spheres stood apart, his temper in respect of them was much the same. In church and state alike he prized institutions and the great organs of corporate life; but what he thought of most and cared for and sought after most, was not their mechanism, though on that too he set its value, but the living spirit within the institution. In church and state alike he moved cautiously and tentatively. In both alike he strove to unite order, whether temporal order in the state or spiritual order in the church, with his sovereign principle of freedom. Many are the difficulties in the way of applying Cavour’s formula of a free church in a free state, as most countries and their governors have by now found out. Yet to have a vivid sense of the supreme importance of the line between temporal power and spiritual is the note of a statesman fit for modern times. “The whole of my public life,” he wrote to the Bishop of Oxford in 1863, “with respect to matters ecclesiastical, for the last twenty years and more, has been a continuing effort, though a very weak one, to extricate her in some degree from entangled relations without shock or violence.”

(M45) The general temper of his churchmanship on its political side during these years is admirably described in a letter to his eldest son, and some extracts from it furnish a key to his most characteristic frame of mind in attempting to guide the movements of his time:—

_To W. H. Gladstone._

_April 16, 1865._—You appeared to speak with the supposition, a
very natural one, that it was matter of duty to defend all the
privileges and possessions of the church; that concession would
lead to concession; and that the end of the series would be its
destruction.... Now, in the first place, it is sometimes necessary
in politics to make surrenders of what, if not surrendered, will
be wrested from us. And it is very wise, when a necessity of this
kind is approaching, to anticipate it while it is yet a good way
off; for then concession begets gratitude, and often brings a
return. The _kind_ of concession which is really mischievous is
just that which is made under terror and extreme pressure; and
unhappily this has been the kind of concession which for more than
two hundred years, it has been the fashion of men who call (and
who really think) themselves “friends of the church” to make.... I
believe it would be a wise concession, upon grounds merely
political, for the church of England to have the law of church
rate abolished in all cases where it places her in fretting
conflict with the dissenting bodies.... I say all this, however,
not to form the groundwork of a conclusion, but only in
illustration of a general maxim which is applicable to political
questions.

But next, this surely is a political question. Were we asked to
surrender an article of the creed in order to save the rest, or to
consent to the abolition of the episcopal order, these things
touch the faith of Christians and the life of the church, and
cannot in any measure become the subject of compromise. But the
external possessions of the church were given it for the more
effectual promotion of its work, and may be lessened or abandoned
with a view to the same end.... Now we have lived into a time when
the great danger of the church is the sale of her faith for
gold.... In demanding the money of dissenters for the worship of
the church, we practically invest them with a title to demand that
she should be adapted to their use in return, and we stimulate
every kind of interference with her belief and discipline to that
end. By judiciously waiving an undoubted legal claim, we not only
do an act which the understood principles of modern liberty tend
to favour and almost require, but we soothe ruffled minds and
tempers, and what is more, we strengthen the case and claim of the
church to be respected as a religious body.... I am convinced that
the only hope of making it possible for her to discharge her high
office as stewardess of divine truth, is to deal tenderly and
gently with all the points at which her external privileges
_grate_ upon the feelings and interests of that unhappily large
portion of the community who have almost ceased in any sense to
care for her. This is a principle of broad application, broader
far than the mere question of church rates. It is one not
requiring precipitate or violent action, or the disturbance
prematurely of anything established; but it supplies a rule of the
first importance for dealing with the mixed questions of temporal
and religious interest when they arise. I am very anxious to see
it quietly but firmly rooted in your mind. It is connected with
the dearest interests not only of my public life, but as I believe
of our religion.... I am in no way anxious that you should take my
opinions in politics as a model for your own. Your free
concurrence will be a lively pleasure to me. But above all I wish
you to be free. What I have now been dwelling upon is a matter
higher and deeper than the region of mere opinion. It has fallen
to my lot to take a share larger than that of many around me,
though in itself slight, in bringing the principle I have
described into use as a ground of action. I am convinced that if I
have laboured to any purpose at all it has been in great part for
this. It is part of that business of reconciling the past with the
new time and order, which seems to belong particularly to our
country and its rulers.

He then goes on to cite as cases where something had been done towards securing the action of the church as a religious body, Canada, where clergy and people now appointed their own bishop; a recent judgment of the privy council leading to widespread emancipation of the colonial church; the revival of convocation; the licence to convocation to alter the thirty-sixth canon; the bestowal of self-government on Oxford. “In these measures,” he says, “I have been permitted to take my part; but had I adopted the rigid rule of others in regard to the temporal prerogatives, real or supposed, of the church, I should at once have lost all power to promote them.”

“As to disruption,” he wrote in these days, “that is the old cry by means of which in all times the temporal interests of the English church have been upheld in preference to the spiritual. The church of England is much more likely of the two, to part with her faith than with her funds. It is the old question, which is the greater, the _gold_ or the altar that sanctifies the gold. Had this question been more boldly asked and more truly answered in other times, we should not have been where we now are. And by continually looking to the gold and not the altar, the dangers of the future will be not diminished but increased.”(111)

(M46) In 1866 Mr. Gladstone for the first time voted for the abolition of church rates. Later in the session he introduced his own plan, not in his capacity as minister, but with the approval of the Russell cabinet. After this cabinet had gone out, Mr. Gladstone in 1868 introduced a bill, abolishing all legal proceedings for the recovery of church rates, except in cases of rates already made, or where money had been borrowed on the security of the rates. But it permitted voluntary assessments to be made, and all agreements to make such payments on the faith of which any expense was incurred, remained enforcible in the same manner as contracts of a like character. Mr. Gladstone’s bill became law in the course of the summer, and a struggle that had been long and bitter ended.

In another movement in the region of ecclesiastical machinery, from which much was hoped, though little is believed to have come, Mr. Gladstone was concerned, though I do not gather from the papers that he watched it with the zealous interest of some of his friends. Convocation, the ancient assembly or parliament of the clergy of the church of England, was permitted in 1852 to resume the active functions that had been suspended since 1717. To Mr. Gladstone some revival or institution of the corporate organisation of the church, especially after the Gorham judgment, was ever a cherished object. Bishop Wilberforce, long one of the most intimate of his friends, was chief mover in proceedings that, as was hoped, were to rescue the church from the anarchy in which one branch of her sons regarded her as plunged. Some of Mr. Gladstone’s correspondence on the question of convocation has already been made public.(112) Here it is enough to print a passage or two from a letter addressed by him to the bishop (Jan. 1, 1854) setting out his view of the real need of the time. After a generous exaltation of the zeal and devotion of the clergy, he goes on to the gains that might be expected from their effective organisation:—

First as to her pastoral work, her warfare against sin, she would
put forth a strength, not indeed equal to it, but at least so much
less unequal than it now is, that the good fight would everywhere
be maintained, and she would not be as she now is, either hated or
unknown among the myriads who form the right arm of England’s
industry and skill. As to her doctrine and all that hangs upon it,
such questions as might arise would be determined by the
deliberate and permanent sense of the body. Some unity in belief
is necessary to justify association in a Christian communion. Will
that unity in belief be promoted or impaired by the free action of
mind within her, subjected to order? If her case really were so
desperate that her children had no common faith, then the sooner
that imposture were detected the better; but if she has, then her
being provided with legitimate, orderly, and authentic channels,
for expressing and bringing to a head, as need arises, the
sentiments of her people, will far more clearly manifest, and
while manifesting will extend, deepen, and consolidate, that
unity. It is all very well to sneer at councils: but who among us
will deny that the councils which we acknowledge as lawful
representatives of the universal church, were great and to all
appearance necessary providential instruments in the establishment
of the Christian faith?

But, say some, we cannot admit the laity into convocation, as it
would be in derogation of the rights of the clergy; or as others
say, it would separate the church from the state. And others, more
numerous and stronger, in their fear of the exclusive constitution
of the convocation, resist every attempt at organising the church,
and suffer, and even by suffering promote, the growth of all our
evils. I will not touch the question of convocation except by
saying that, in which I think you concur, that while the present
use is unsatisfactory and even scandalous, no form of church
government that does not distinctly and fully provide for the
expression of the voice of the laity either can be had, or if it
could would satisfy the needs of the church of England. But in my
own mind as well as in this letter, I am utterly against all
premature, all rapid conclusions.... It will be much in our day
if, towards the cure of such evils, when we die we can leave to
our children the precious knowledge that a beginning has been
made—a beginning not only towards enabling the bishops and clergy
to discharge their full duty, but also, and yet more, towards
raising the real character of membership in those millions upon
millions, the whole bulk of our community, who now have its name
and its name alone.

II

In 1860 a volume appeared containing seven “essays and reviews” by seven different writers, six of them clergymen of the church of England. The topics were miscellaneous, the treatment of them, with one exception,(113) was neither learned nor weighty, the tone was not absolutely uniform, but it was as a whole mildly rationalistic, and the negations, such as they were, exhibited none of the fierceness or aggression that had marked the old controversies about Hampden, or Tract Ninety, or Ward’s _Ideal_. A storm broke upon the seven writers, that they little intended to provoke. To the apparent partnership among them was severely imputed a sinister design. They were styled “the Septem contra Christum”—six ministers of religion combining to assail the faith they outwardly professed—seven authors of an immoral rationalistic conspiracy. Two of them were haled into the courts, one for casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible, the other for impugning the eternity of the future punishment of the wicked. The Queen in council upon appeal was advised to reverse a hostile judgment in the court below (1864), and Lord Chancellor Westbury delivered the decision in a tone described in the irreverent epigram of the day as “dismissing eternal punishment with costs.” This carried further, or completed, the principle of the Gorham judgment fourteen years before, and just as that memorable case determined that neither the evangelical nor the high anglican school should drive out the other, so the judgment in the case of _Essays and Reviews_ determined that neither should those two powerful sections drive out the new critical, rationalistic, liberal, or latitudinarian school. “It appears to me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Bishop of London (April 26, 1864), “that the spirit of this judgment has but to be consistently and cautiously followed up, in order to establish, as far as the court can establish it, a complete indifference between the Christian faith and the denial of it. I do not believe it is in the power of human language to bind the understanding and conscience of man with any theological obligations, which the mode of argument used and the principles assumed [in the judgment] would not effectually unloose.” To Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, who had taken part in one of the two cases, he wrote:—

_Feb. 8, 1864._—This new and grave occurrence appertains to a
transition state through which the Christian faith is passing. The
ship is at sea far from the shore she left, far from the shore she
is making for. This or that deflection from her course, from this
or that wind of heaven, we cannot tell what it is, or whether
favourable or adverse to her true work and destination, unless we
know all the stages of the experience through which she has yet to
pass. It seems to me that these judgments are most important in
their character as illustrations of a system, or I should rather
say, of the failure of a system, parts of a vast scheme of forces
and events in the midst of which we stand, which seem to govern
us, but which are in reality governed by a hand above. It may be
that this rude shock to the mere scripturism which has too much
prevailed, is intended to be the instrument of restoring a greater
harmony of belief, and of the agencies for maintaining belief. But
be that as it may, the valiant soldier who has fought manfully
should be, and I hope will be, of good cheer.

In the same connection he wrote to Sir W. Farquhar, a friend from earliest days:—

_Jan. 31, 1865._—I have never been much disposed to a great
exaltation of clerical power, and I agree in the necessity of
taking precautions against the establishment, especially of an
insular and local though in its sphere legitimate authority, of
new doctrines for that Christian faith which is not for England or
France but for the world; further, I believe it has been a mistake
in various instances to institute the coercive proceedings which
have led to the present state of things. I remember telling the
Archbishop of York at Penmaenmawr, when he was Bishop of
Gloucester, that it seemed to me we had lived into a time when,
speaking generally, penal proceedings for the maintenance of
divine truth among the clergy would have to be abandoned, and
moral means alone depended on. But, on the other hand, I feel that
the most vital lay interests are at stake in the definite teaching
and profession of the Christian faith, and the general tendency
and effect of the judgments has been and is likely to be hostile
to that definite teaching, and unfavourable also to the moral tone
and truthfulness, of men who may naturally enough be tempted to
shelter themselves under judicial glosses in opposition to the
plain meaning of words. The judgments of the present tribunal
continued in a series would, I fear, result in the final triumph
(in a sense he did not desire) of Mr. Ward’s non-natural sense;
and the real question is whether our objection to non-natural
senses is general, or is only felt when the sense favoured is the
one opposed to our own inclinations.

III

No theological book, wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1866, that has appeared since the _Vestiges of Creation_ twenty years before (1844), had attracted anything like the amount of notice bestowed upon “the remarkable volume entitled _Ecce Homo_,” published in 1865. It was an attempt, so Mr. Gladstone described it, to bring home to the reader the impression that there is something or other called the Gospel, “which whatever it may be,” as was said by an old pagan poet of the Deity,(114) has formidable claims not merely on the intellectual condescension, but on the loyal allegiance and humble obedience of mankind. The book violently displeased both sides. It used language that could not be consistently employed in treating of Christianity from the orthodox point of view. On the other hand, it constituted “a grave offence in the eyes of those to whom the chequered but yet imposing fabric of actual Christianity, still casting its majestic light and shadow over the whole civilised world, is a rank eyesore and an intolerable offence.” Between these two sets of assailants Mr. Gladstone interposed with a friendlier and more hopeful construction.(115) He told those who despised the book as resting on no evidence of the foundations on which it was built, and therefore as being shallow and uncritical, that we have a right to weigh the nature of the message, apart from the credentials of the messenger. Then he reassured the orthodox by the hope that “the present tendency to treat the old belief of man with a precipitate, shallow, and unexamining disparagement” is only a passing distemper, and that to the process of its removal the author of the book would have the consolation and the praise of having furnished an earnest, powerful, and original contribution.(116) Dean Milman told him that he had brought to life again a book that after a sudden and brief yet brilliant existence seemed to be falling swiftly into oblivion. The mask of the anonymous had much to do, he thought, with its popularity, as had happened to the _Vestiges of Creation_. Undoubtedly when the mask fell off, interest dropped.

(M47) Dr. Pusey found the book intensely painful. “I have seldom,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “been able to read much at a time, but shut the book for pain, as I used to do with Renan’s.” What revolted him was not the exhibition of the human nature of the central figure, but of a human nature apart from and inconsistent with its divinity; the writer’s admiring or patronising tone was loathsome. “What you have yourself written,” Pusey said, “I like much. But its bearings on _Ecce Homo_ I can hardly divine, except by way of contrast.” Dr. Newman thought that here was a case where _materiam superabat opus_, and that Mr. Gladstone’s observations were more valuable for their own sake, than as a recommendation or defence of the book:—

_Jan. 9, 1868._—I hope I have followed you correctly, says Newman:
your main proposition seems to be, that whereas both Jew and
Gentile had his own notion of an heroic humanity, and neither of
them a true notion, the one being political, the other even
immoral, the first step necessary for bringing in the idea of an
Emmanuel into the world, was to form the human mould into which it
’might drop,’ and thus to supplant both the Judaic and the heathen
misconception by the exhibition of the true idea. Next, passing
from antecedent probabilities to history, the order of succession
of the synoptical and the fourth gospels does in fact fulfil this
reasonable anticipation. This seems to me a _very great_ view, and
I look forward eagerly to what you have still to say in
illustration of it. The only objection which I see can be made to
it is, that it is a clever controversial expedient after the event
for accounting for a startling fact. This is an objection not
peculiar to it, but to all explanations of the kind. Still, the
question remains—whether it is a fact that the sacred writers
recognise, however indirectly, the wise economy which you assert,
or whether it is only an hypothesis?

As to the specific principles and particular opinions in Mr. Gladstone’s criticism of what we now see to have been a not very effective or deeply influential book, we may think as we will. But the temper of his review, the breadth of its outlook on Christian thought, tradition, and society, show no mean elements in the composition of his greatness. So, too, does the bare fact that under the pressure of office and all the cares of a party leader in a crisis, his mind should have been free and disengaged enough to turn with large and eager interest to such themes as these. This was indeed the freedom of judgment with which, in the most moving lines of the poem that he loved above all others, Virgil bidding farewell to Dante makes him crowned and mitred master of himself—_Perch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio._(117)

IV

(M48) Other strong gusts swept the high latitudes, when Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, published certain destructive criticisms upon the canonical Scriptures. His metropolitan at Cape Town pronounced sentence of deprivation; Colenso appealed to the Queen in council; and the Queen in council was advised that the proceedings of the Bishop of Cape Town were null and void, for in law there was no established church in the colony, nor any ecclesiastical court with lawful jurisdiction.(118) This triumph of heresy was a heavy blow. In 1866 Bishop Colenso brought an action against Mr. Gladstone and the other trustees of the colonial bishoprics fund, calling upon them to set aside a sum of ten thousand pounds for the purpose of securing the income of the Bishop of Natal, and to pay him his salary, which they had withheld since his wrongful deprivation. “We,” said Mr. Gladstone to Miss Burdett Coutts, “founding ourselves on the judgment, say there is no see of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and therefore, of course, no bishop of such a see.” Romilly, master of the rolls, gave judgment in favour of Colenso. These perplexities did not dismay Mr. Gladstone. “Remembering what the churches in the colonies were some forty years back, when I first began (from my father’s having a connection with the West Indies), to feel an interest in them, I must own that they present a cheering, a remarkable, indeed a wonderful spectacle.” “I quite feel with you,” he says to Miss Burdett Coutts, “a great uneasiness at what may follow from the exercise of judicial powers by synods merely ecclesiastical, especially if small, remote, and unchecked by an active public opinion. But in the American episcopal church it has been found practicable in a great degree to obviate any dangers from such a source.” Ten years after this, in one of the most remarkable articles he ever wrote, speaking of the protestant evangelical section of the adherents of the Christian system, he says that no portion of this entire group seems to be endowed with greater vigour than this in the United States and the British colonies, which has grown up in new soil, “_and far from the possibly chilling shadow of national establishments of religion_.”(119)