Rome, reform and reaction. Four lectures on the religious situation;

Front matter

ROME . . . .

REFORM AND REACTION . .

K

Preface

This book is not a treatise, but the publication of a Series of Lectures ; which may account for the lack of references, some repetition, and some conversational or dogmatic symptoms of direct address. At the same time additions have been made, or parts retained which were omitted in delivery as being in a style adapted for the reader rather than for the hearer.

I ought also to say that, as I do not aim at any contribution of scientific value, I have abstained from reading the recent works of Dr. Fairbairn and Dr. Brown till I am now set free for that pleasure. That they are inimitable would not prevent their being too contagious for the individuality of a comparative amateur on the same topic. And any

Vlll PREFACE

coincidences that occur may thus mean the more.

Page 1 70 is based on a passage in Eucken ; and the series on page 45 is a reminiscence from Bunsen.

I am under much obligation to Rev. J. A. Hamilton, of Penzance, for amendments in proof.

Contents

PAGE

LECTURE I

What is the Real Nature of the Present Issue ? . . . . • 13

Part II. Some Real Sources of the Priest's Welcome . . . .212

ix

THE REAL NATURE OF THE PRESENT ISSUE

THE REAL NATURE OF THE PRESENT ISSUE

I DO not share the repugnance felt by a large number of people, especially in the present day, to religious controversy. The ruling spirit of the great classic ages and figures of faith has been one of controversy how^ever rarefied. It is true that it rested alvi^ays on a deep certainty and peace, but it w^as a security that did not allov^ them to become quietists, but thrust them into the front of battle. We have room and need for the men of peace, but one should protest against a tendency to erect them into the ideal figures of Christianity. They deserve love and honour, but in critical times it is other men and other helps that we chiefly need. In a crisis the man of peace may be counted in the main as a friend of the established side. The prophets of the Old Testament were men of war. The whole mission of Israel was to be fulfilled in the face of a gainsaying world. The work of Christ was incessant controversy — the Lord's controversy. The life of Paul w^as ceaseless warfare. The Epistles of John proceed from the thick of a battle which Christian faith was waging for its life, when Christian love knew how to hate and fear. The great figures of Church history have been those whose words and deeds come down to us from the midst of campaigns. Athanasius, who saved the Church's life, was set against a world in arms. And the Reformation age meant war. Luther lived and breathed in it. If the Reformation is not yet done we must dread war less. It is easy for us to talk against controversy when it is the life-toil of the great controversialists that has given us the ease we propose only to enjoy.

We need to revive some or the heroic features of faith. We are in danger from its feminine and sympathetic side, from its restful and acquiescent mood. We are apt to treat religion as the region of ease as well as the secret of peace. We deprecate the opening of its questions, or, when they are opened, the pursuit of them. We do not reflect that no frame of ours could be better than that for the enemies of faith. They are quite willing that we should cultivate a quietist's peace, minimise differences, and dwell on the common stock of belief, so long as we leave them with the monopolies and the abuses they represent. There are many people who think that the kingdom of heaven means first a quiet life and the cultivation of friendly feeling all round. They do not naturally like conflict, and religion is not strong enough in them to compel them beyond their natural likes. They do not reflect that conflict comes to the great v^arriors not as a sport or hobby, but as a painful duty and a stern obedience. Let them read Jeremiah, the gentle, peace-loving man whom the hand of God thrust into the caldron of his seething time. Let them note in many another how^ the trumpet broke upon their selfish peace as the breath of God to save them from the stagnation or goodness, and stir them v^^ith the tonic of the fight. I am sure that many a time the revival of religion which we pray for ought to come by a renewal of the heroic vein of faith, with a new crusade ; and the baptism of the spirit should be a baptism of blood. One reason why controversy is deprecated at present is that sympathy has been growing at the expense of principle. Our philanthropic energies have, for the time, submerged our energies of righteousness. I do not say so in a grudging spirit. We move forward with one foot at a time. For the present it is the turn of the heart side ; but the time is far spent, and it grows needful that, if we are to keep from falling, there should be a step by the other foot and a movement of the other side. It is time that we returned with our attention to the side of mind and principle, that we recognised another test than beneficence, and that we sought to clear our views for action on some of the great old issues now in abeyance. There are whole sections of the public whose mawkish religion needs more than anything else a gospel of severity, others whose sickly charity is anaemic for want of the breath of justice, and others whose aesthetic decorum can only be roused by some action in sufficiently bad taste to break their idol.

There is another reason for that distaste of controversy which takes so much virility from our faith and age.

I do not now mean the dislike of many for the passions which controversy lets loose. People who habitually cannot control their tempers and their tongues should not enter controversy. They are unfit for the heroic and the noble side of life. But, (I may interject,) those also are unfit for it, and are guilty of some cowardice, who give way to the bullies, or who shrink from the advocacy of the right because the enemy uses poisoned arrows. There is a worse thing than the temper and abuse of controversy, and that is the mawkish sweetness and maudlin piety of the people who are everybody's brothers and can stand up to none.

But I leave that and return to the weightier reason

REAL NATURE OF THE PRESENT ISSUE \y

that I have hinted for the dislike of controversy. It is the feeb'ng on the part of many that it is sterile, and leaves us at the end no farther than when v^^e began.

Nov^^ this is not the case. I will venture to say that none ever came out of a real argument other than the better for it, provided that they behaved themselves. If they did nothing else, they cleared up their own views to themselves. They probably suggested new aspects of the case to the bystanders. And they may even have done so to their adversary, or he to them. And in any case their faculties were stirred ; their mind was the healthier for the gymnastic ; and they escaped for a time from the women's quarters, and from the office and from the shop, into the breeze. They are not where they were at the outset.

And so it is with the great controversies that mark and make history, and especially the history of the Church. They do not come upon us to-day with exactly the same call, the same problem, the same historic situation as those of our fathers. The problem moves. It does not present itself to us in the fixed formula of our predecessors. It is really a new problem ; it is a new question set in the same rule. Those who handled it before renewed it in their time. They added something to it. They passed it on to us as something different, and ready for our contribution through theirs. The people who enlarge most on the sterility of controversy are those who know least about it, who have gone no deeper than its surface, who have resented the call to think, and be just ; or who ran away to save their nice manners as soon as the bad language began. It is a trait of the whole Agnostic habit of mind thus to belittle the past, to succumb to helplessness, and acquiesce in despair. The same habit which says we can know nothing about God says also that we can know nothing about any of those tough and fascinating matters which men have argued for generations. It is the same shallow impatience on both heads, the same scepticism of human effort and intelligence. The same quality of mind as distrusts God's effort in revelation, distrusts man's effort in understanding it. Give us the man that cannot take his mind off the North Pole. The great problems are not to be settled in a generation ; they are of historic dimensions.

They extend over many generations, as some mathematical problems may cover days. But each day contributes something to the huge chain of calculation ; and so it is with the great controversies of the past. We take them up where our predecessors left them, not where they found them. There are questions that have lasted or even slept for centuries, and whose aspect is materially and for ever changed by the work of the last fifty years. But it is the change of evolution, not of the kaleidoscope. It moves for all that. Take the Protestant question. What did the Reformation do ? Simply add one to the many efforts at reform already made ? No. It attacked the same question, but in quite a new way, with new light from Luther's original experience and genius. But was Luther's experience so new ? Again, no. It was the revival of the same controversy as engrossed the life of Paul. It was fighting the same battle over again. But is that not rather hopeless ? Surely no, still. It was on a far wider scale, in a far more searching spirit, at least as far as the enemy was concerned. It was a war with Paganism, but it was with the more terrible Christian Paganism. And, besides, is it hopeless to find that the great cause which had gone out of clear sight for 1,500 years refused to lie dead, and asserted itself with such amazing power ? Is it hopeless to-day to see so much of the work of the Reformation still to be done ? We should not find it so. The corruptions and abuses of fifteen centuries were not to be thrown off in one, and it is eighteen centuries that we are struggling with to-day. Was it likely that Europe could speedily get rid of the moral and spiritual malaria which had lain so long in her system that death grew her habit of life ? Nay, was it not probable that there should be relapses, that the new life should have a tough fight for it, that it should have to be nursed back through a tedious convalescence, vi^ith much to dishearten and much to try us ? How often the convalescence is longer than the disease ! Again, hov\^ vast the Reformation principle is, the evangelical principle ! It is the Gospel. That is why human nature hates and resists it worse than it does Rome. For long the New Testament principle will not leaven Europe, though it has been 2,000 years at work on it ; and the Reformation has been working only a few centuries. The situation is anything but hopeless if we will take pains to understand the nature of the principles at work, of the Gospel, and of the enemy. The hopeless people are the people who will not take pains, who are not in earnest.

If, indeed, our Protestantism to-day called upon us to go back to the Reformers and adopt their beliefs and practices in a mass, we might well demur ; and we might suspect the uses of controversy, or its progress in history. But controversy, the battle of truth and right, cannot be the one thing which does not progress amid all the energies of man. And we are not asked to adopt the theology of the Reformers nor their polity en bloc. What we are asked to do is to take their principle and carry it out in a way they could not do, to develop the Reformation, to reform the Reformers, to take the results their principle has achieved, to go back with these results upon their positions, to re-read their positions in the light of their own results, to apply these principles afresh to the ground that they themselves have cleared, and so to carry them forward to new conquests and new expressions. Protestantism is not resuming the entire theology of the Reformers, but correcting their theology, when necessary, by their Gospel, by their principle of faith. We may correct Luther's dogmas by Luther's thoughts, and his thoughts by his faith. And so, even the High Church movement of to-day, medieval as it is, is not a mere copy ; it is not a return to medievalism in the sense of lifting over bodily the theological contents of the Middle Ages, and pressing them upon faith as if no water had flowed under the bridge from that day to this. It is recalling the medieval principle of the Church, or of faith, and reading the world of to-day in that light. The very Church of Rome itself, with its claim to be the I'lv'mg Church, takes stand on a great doctrine of development ; and it put the crown on the long series by the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was not formulated till twenty years ago. People speak and write of a Reformation Settlement. There was no such thing. For this country at least the Reformation was much more of an unsettlement. It was a beginning, not an end. It was but the thin end of the evangelical idea which pierces to the dividing asunder or every mere Catholic institution, and must overturn till He come whose right it is to reign directly in each soul. There was nothing in the nature of the Reformation which promised immediate finality either to Church or to State. As a matter of fact it has brought much more ferment than finality, and the more outward ferment in proportion as it gave the soul an inward finality. The peace of the justified waged but the keener war against things unjustifiable. And if the political settlement had been a much more explicit thing than it was, it would still be at the mercy of the principle of spiritual power and freedom which the Reformation only introduced.

It is a great thing to be involved in these noble old controversies. There are many worse things than war on those lofty planes. The object of faith is not to provide us with a quiet life. Little men may belittle any conflict, but the conflict is great. The issue is high. Let it be handled in a highminded way. Do not let us fight as if our one foe were some village cleric, some rural autocrat, and petty priest. The conflict is one which has engrossed the very greatest human souls and involves the greatest divine destinies. It is not English, but ecumenical. No State question approaches in moment the gravity of the question about the true nature of faith, and the consequent true nature of the Church. It is the human question. It is a war of angels, saints, apostles, prophets ; let us wage it as men of the saintly and apostolic faith in Jesus Christ.

II

There are many who reel disheartened in the present religious situation because it appears to them that we are in danger of losing all that the last 300 years have gained, and of having to fight the whole Reformation battle over again. This is not so. Even if the conflict become more severe than it is, it is yet not the old straw that is threshed nor the long dead that is slain. It is indeed the old problem that confronts us ; it is not a new one. But it is the old problem at quite a new stage. It is the old problem at a stage which has developed a new answer, or compels the answer in new terms. It is the old problem of the unfinished Reformation ; but it has advanced to a stage at which it becomes clear as it never was in its history before that the first answer is Disestablishment. That is the social consummation of the spiritual necessity in the Reformation. The battle with the world for a free Gospel can only be won by a free Church ; and a free Church is the inevitable effect of a free Gospel, of the freedom of the spiritual power. At the English Reformation there were but the two alternatives — a royal Church or a Roman Church, Erastianism or Catholicism. If you resented the royal supremacy you could realise the freedom of the Church only in a Catholic form, and between Henry and More our heart is all with More. But history has developed a better way. Before the Reformation the freedom of the State had only been attained by the subjection of the Church, or the freedom of the Church by the subjection of the State. But the existence of the Free Churches has shown, and their prosperity points, another and a better way. The solution of the old problem is a free Church in a free State.

It is the old problem, but it is in a stage quite new. And this means a new stage also in the development of the idea of faith, in the public idea o religion.

Let me explain what I mean. And let me do so by referring first to the history of this country alone, and next to the larger history of the Christian Church.

First as to this country alone.

There have been three great junctures at which English religion has been brought into direct and critical relation with the State. The first was at the

Reformation, the second was at the Commonwealth, and we are in the midst of the third. In the first the spiritual power was completely subjected to the temporal through the passion and self-will of the Tudors, and especially of Henry VIII. In the second it was partially released through the magnificent statesmanship of Cromwell. In the third the release promises to become complete. In the first stage the ruling idea for the Church was still uniformity, only with a lay head instead of a clerical, with Henry where the Pope had been. In the second the ruling idea was toleration, or comprehension, with a tenderness for some form of concurrent establishment. By the providence of God the sects had arisen ; and this, which is so often deplored in connection with Protestantism, became the means by which the idea of toleration was forced upon the public as a step to something higher — religious liberty. In the third stage the ruling idea has passed beyond either comprehension or toleration, yea, beyond liberty ; for the Free Churches are not only let alone by the State, but equally respected, and not only tolerated by each other but owned and acknowledged as members of each other. And it becomes clear that this consummation is only possible throughout by total disestablishment. We regain, on a far higher and more spiritual plane, the freedom which the Church, had, and always demands, in the Roman system. It is the old problem of the Church's freedom, but it is in quite a new sta2:e : and it is in a new direction that we look for the solution.

For long the only escape from a State uniformity seemed to be into the Roman supremacy ; but the last 250 years have opened a new and living way — the way pointed by Independency and heralded in the Commonwealth — the way of the Free Churches, of federated instead of monarchical unity in the Church. This freedom of the Church is the only true completion of the Reformation on its ecclesiastical side. And the reason why the Low Church party are powerless against the priest to-day is because no Established Church can ever in spirit be truly Protestant. It is too institutional, too legal. It is weak against the priest because it is spiritually lamed by its compromise with the State. The Reformation faith that should fight the priest has one hand occupied in clinging to the State and it can do little more than shake the other. Among the crucial religious junctures I did not name the great Evangelical movement of a century ago, which in the Low Church party has now settled on its lees. And I avoided doing so because it neither had nor led to any direct action on the State. It lost the imperial interests of religion. The indirect public and social service of that movement, especially outside the Established Church, has been unspeakable ; but its tendency has never been to the larger historic issues which are most critical for the national life. Its strength and its weakness have been its individualism and pietism. The weakness has been especially developed in the established section of it. And its distaste for public and historic affairs has led to a mental cramp which is another aspect or source of its powerlessness in the present crisis. Whatever may be said of the High Church party, it cannot be said that they have disowned the public, social and historic mind. And nothing could furnish a greater contrast with the fate of the Evangelical party in the Church than the career which the same movement has followed in the Methodist bodies that carried it outside the State. The Reformation principle found itself in them ; and it moves in them still with growing power to its true effect of freedom.

Ill

But why has the course of the Reformation in this country been so slow ? And why have we still to be working out what other lands have long settled ? And why does the conflict spread over not only so many battles but so many campaigns ?

Because the Reformation, though spiritual in its aim and genius, was in this country only to an inferior degree a religious movement. It was in the first place a political movement, and in its methods violent and coercive. It has been cursed vi^ith the taint of force, and it has only been slowly purified into a better mind.

There is a striking analogy offered here with the course of spiritual progress in the history of another intractable people, Israel. The soul of the Reformation is the moral spirit of the prophet rising up against the canonical temper of the priest. Now in the history of Hebrew prophetism we have the same course of error and the like correction of it. We have the reforming prophetic spirit in Abijah, Elijah, and all the early prophets, protesting against the pagan or curial corruption of religion, but mixing itself with political conspiracy, and employing political methods even to the extent of massacre and other violent means, as in the case of the priests of Baal. And we have this violence reproducing violence through some centuries, till the kingdom was destroyed by the nemesis of its reactions in the exile. But all the time the prophetic spirit was disengaging itself from this crudity and barbarity of its early methods. It became by experience spiritualised into the almost Christian inspiration of Jeremiah and the second Isaiah. These may be said to have been the persecuted Nonconformists who both carried on the principles and refined the methods of the rugged puritans who went before them and brought to pass the great kingdom to come.

It was a like discipline that passed upon the Protestant movement, in this country at least. As it went on it deepened in its principle and sweetened in its ways. The bane of Henry's action was its violence, its self-will, its mere national and individual passion. In the matter of the divorce there is no doubt the Pope was right and Henry wrong. Had the movement been only of man Henry would have killed it. As it was he threw it back indefinitely, and entailed upon a long posterity the task of making good the errors of his coarse lead. If England had only had but one commanding religious genius to be for her what Luther, Calvin, and Knox were to their respective lands ! The like masterful and violent policy marked Elizabeth, though to a less degree. And it was largely compelled, I must admit, by the fight for national life against the incessant political plots and treacheries of Rome. It was the potsherds of the earth striving with the potsherds of the earth by earthy methods on either side.

The Anglicans insist that the Established Church is not a Protestant Church, and there is a sense in which they are right. What established the National Church did not establish the Reformation. That was done by the Puritans, whose tradition we continue.

The National Church was established by Henry, and Henry was no Protestant. The nationalism of the Church had been founded before, amid the national aspirations which fermented in the whole of Europe before the Reformation, but it had striven in vain to establish itself against the Ultramontanism of the Pope. What did establish it was Henry's act in a plea where Henry was v/rong and the Pope was right. The National Church was established by (I do not say founded on) a crime of wrong and force. And of that crime the Free Churches with their sufferings are the remote expiation, as they are the perfecting of the true and living word of the Reformation.

But the Reformation would have come, Henry or none, though it would have come otherwise and better without the Tudors.

Among the despised and persecuted sects there was growing up a new idea of the Church and its freedom. And when Cromwell came to power — far more truly than Henry the Defender of the Faith — there emerged into political practice for the first time the idea of toleration and mutual respect between the sections of the Church. This idea, with its blossom of civil and especially religious liberty, has been the great direct contribution of Independency to the higher life of England. It was an idea that seemed to many at the time a political peril and a religious crime. It could have come, historically speaking, by no other way than by the sects. They were there by the will of God for the service of His great Church and its freedom. They came to give the idea of spiritual freedom a new interpretation. It was by the descent of this idea under Henry's royal supremacy, and its disguise under the extravagance of the sects — it was through such humiliation, death and burial that the idea passed out of its Roman form and rose into the large liberty of the Spirit for which the Free Churches stand.

But the Commonwealth only placed this idea in a monumental way on the political ground. It was not able to keep it there. The advance was too great and rapid to be permanent. The whole spiritual resource of English Protestantism was expended on this immense move, and there was none left to consolidate it. The great wave swept back ; the Restoration came with its disastrous results to morals as well as faith. And it was not till 1688 that the principle of toleration was really incorporated with the English Constitution. And it has taken all the time from then till now to develop toleration into its true form of liberty. The work is not yet complete, but completion is in sight. And the total separation of Church and State becomes to an increasing number not only the solution of present difficulties, but the necessary consummation of our national and ecclesiastical past.

Why was it that the great spiritual triumph of the Commonwealth was so short-lived ? Just because it was (through the inevitable circumstances of the time) to so large an extent unspiritual ; because, though it was the triumph of England's best soul, it was the victory of an army. It was a victory of the stalwarts rather than of the saints. It was faith, but it was mailed faith, faith working by force and secured by the sword. Why has the battle of spiritual liberty been so slow and hard from then to now ? Because of that memory of an army's triumph, though it was the godliest army that the world ever saw, the first serious attempt to make the Bible instead of the Church the ruling influence in State affairs. So bitter were the

o

memories left by that victory that it is doubtful if we should have got even the toleration of a century later had Dissent not become so weak in the reaction as to be thought contemptible and harmless.

Both in Henry's work and in Cromwell's the great triumph was really retarded by the force and haste of the particular victories. He that believeth should not make haste. It was on no national conversion or conviction that either movement stood ; and the wrath of man, even of godly men, does not work out to its high end the spiritual righteousness of God. Spiritual freedom can only be secured by spiritual and reasonable ways. Neither man nor nation can be coerced into freedom. It must sink into men's minds as a principle. It must convert the nation, and not merely the elite of the nation, to its faith. A godless king goes down before a godly army. But even the godly army melts before the slow growth and instinct of parliamentary rule. Representative conviction wins permanent victories and achieves beneficent revolutions which are refused to dictatorial conviction. A parliament is in its nature a more spiritual thing than a despot, even a godly despot. It appeals to moral conviction and rational consent. It is better that a Church should be ruled by a parliament than by a king. It is better because it is more hopeful. There is more hope that a parliament, with its base deep and deepening in the national reason, should see its true relation to an institution like the Church, which appeals to spiritual conviction alone. There is hope, I say, that a parliament will perceive that its true relation to the Church lies in letting it alone. It may be brought, without a king's loss of aynour propre^ to feel that to sever with the Church is not to part with it or renounce it, but is the debt and honour due to the Church's holier freedom. Severance here means reverence. First the monarch dictates to the Church, then parliament patronises it. We have now come to a point at which both royal supremacy and parliamentary patronage are felt to be unspiritual things, partaking in different degrees of force and earth, compared with the pure spiritual and rational appeal made by the Gospel, which is the charter of the Church's life.