Crown Theological Library / O , 21. iFrom tbe IGtbrartr of JrofrBBor Irnjamttt Smhtttrfig? Harfwlfc Vpqurattpb bg l|tm to % IGtbrarg of Prtttrrton QUjenlogtral ^mtttarg .AS 1 / v CROWN THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY VOL. XXIV. ANGLICAN LIBERALISM ANGLICAN LIBERALISM BY TWELVE CHURCHMEN NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATE 1908 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/anglicanliberaliOOunse THE MOTTO oioafjiev oe otl o vlovLO/ Kplcrn. 1 may add that the latitude already recog- nised by the courts seems fully to warrant all the toleration for which I contend : and those who most strenuously insist upon comparing clerical subscription to a commercial contract by which a man pledges himself to teach certain dogmas in return for a certain salary, must admit the authority of the courts to determine what that contract means. 1 will say nothing of the judgement in the Gorham case, which allowed the denial of " Baptismal regeneration," and in the Bennett case, which tolerated language about the " real Presence " equally inconsistent with the obvious and prima facie meaning of various statements in the Prayer Book and Articles. I will only call attention to the fact that in the case of Dr 108 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Rowland Williams and Henry Bristow Wilson it was decided that it is not inconsistent with the teaching of the Church of England : ( 1 ) To deny that all parts of the Bible are inspired ; to deny that the Bible as a whole is the word of God, or to speak of Holy Scriptures as "an expression of devout reason" or as "the written voice of the congregation," or to maintain that the writers of the Old Testament were fallible. (2) To speak of the idea of " merit by trans- fer " as a fiction and to hold that justi- fication by faith means " the peace of mind or sense of Divine approval which comes of trust in a righteous God." (3) To express a hope that the punishment of the wicked is not everlasting. The principles of interpretations which can reconcile these doctrines with the plain language of the Ordinal, of the Articles, and of the Athanasian Creed, are principles under which, if logically and impartially applied, no Liberal CLERICAL LIBERALISM 109 for whose presence among the clergy of the Church this essay is an apology need fear con- demnation. And it is only by such principles of interpretation, and by acknowledging the authority of the tribunal which acts upon them, that any decided High Churchman or any decided Evangelical can justify his position in the Church of England after the distinctive tenets of each had been condemned by the ecclesiastical judge. (iii.) So far, I have merely pleaded for tolera- tion of the opinions commonly called " liberal " in the ministry of the Church of England. But, it may be asked, what are the prospects of Liberal Theology in that Church ? The widest and truest sense of the term, Liberal- ism, as I understand it, expresses a general attitude of mind towards theology rather than a definite set of opinions. It repre- sents the attitude of those who are anxious that religious knowledge and religious ideas shall keep pace with the advance of other kinds of knowledge, and who recognise that 110 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM large re-interpretations, restatements — nay, re- constructions — of theological belief are neces- sary if Christian belief is to be placed in harmony with the results of modern science, modern criticism, and modern philosophy. No doubt, when the matter is put in that way, it may well be suggested that in that sense we are all Liberals now — all educated and reflect- ing persons at least. That such is the case is, indeed, just what I want to contend. But for my present purpose it is impossible to avoid using the term as the designation of a particular school of opinion. By Liberalism in the more distinctive or party sense I mean simply the view of those who go somewhat beyond average clerical opinion in their de- mand for this kind of re-construction. What, then, are the prospects of Liberalism, so understood, in the Church of England ; or rather (since my subject is Clerical Liberalism) what are the prospects of its growing and prevailing among the clergy of that Church ? There can be no doubt that the advance CLERICAL LIBERALISM 111 of liberal opinions goes on with rapid strides. Critical opinions about the Bible are spreading among those of the younger clergy — I am afraid they are hardly the majority — who read and think at all seriously. The Old Testament has almost ceased to be even a difficulty. Any critical opinion about the authorship, the date, or even the historicity of its books expressed with moderation and reverence, may be privately or publicly avowed without much obloquy — almost anywhere but in the pulpit. It is even permissible — in most, if not all, clerical circles — to express great deference for Biblical Criticism in general. Nor is it definitely denied that the methods which have proved so successful in unravelling the problem of the Old Testament may legitimately be applied to the New. And even when we come to particular results of criticism, progress is being made. The com- posite character of the Synoptic Gospels — the existence of different strata in their narrative — is never denied ; in short, the critical and his- torical way of looking at the Gospels is spread- 112 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM ing. The Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel is more and more being treated as an open question. Ideas of this kind grow apace. 1725 of the clergy recently signed a de- claration which expressed the " desire that, as many of the clergy have already, with advantage to Christian faith and with a general assent on the part of their rulers, welcomed important results of a patient, reverent, and progressive criticism of the Old Testament, so the clergy, as Christian teachers, may now receive authoritative encouragement to face the critical problems of the New Testament with entire candour." That de- claration would doubtless have been signed by thousands more but for the industriously propagated suggestion that the declaration really meant more than its actual words conveyed. But, for all this, I am far from looking at the present intellectual tone of the Church of England with any approach to optimism. Only to a very small extent is the change of attitude in the clergy revealed in CLERICAL LIBERALISM 113 their pulpit teaching. The laity know what the clergy preach ; they do not know what they think. And what is preached more and more fails to appeal to the lay mind. The alienation in thought and feeling between laity and clergy advances more rapidly than the education and enlightenment of the clergy. Moreover, though criticism may be in a general way tolerated or even approved, the line is very sharply drawn, the moment criticism threatens to conflict with established dogmas. There is, indeed, a much larger number of decided Liberals among the clergy than is commonly suspected. They number hundreds, if not thousands ; and their number grows daily. Even the majority are becoming more and more critical, or at best tolerant of criticism. But after all, the dominant tone of clerical opinion compounds for liberality (or at least silence and vagueness) about critical questions by increased and exaggerated emphasis upon the creeds — the creeds interpreted in a literal and tra- ditional manner — and also upon a body of 8 114 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM sacramental and sacerdotal dogma which is not to be found in any of the Church's formula?. Even where there is some considerable liber- ality of thought, a sacerdotal tone remains, which repels the average layman far more than critical or doctrinal narrowness. Occasionally one discovers men of very advanced liberal views who retain the practices and much of the language of thorough -going Ritualism. I am not without sympathy for the position of men who have outlived their earlier creed without having lost the aesthetic tastes which were once associated with it ; but I strongly feel that the very last way to restore the harmony between lay and clerical feeling which the Oxford Movement destroyed is by attempting to combine a secret and esoteric Rationalism or a sceptical "Pragmatism" with the externals of a Sacerdotalism whose intellectual basis has really been abandoned. The influence of the continental Modernists is already beginning powerfully to affect our younger High Churchmen ; but if they CLERICAL LIBERALISM 115 want to command the intellectual respect accorded to M. Loisy and his associates, they must imitate them in avoiding an exaggerated stress upon the externals of Religion. Many rites and usages which are tolerable enough where they have long been a matter of course, become incompatible with genuine Liberalism and injurious to spiritual Religion when forced by individual clergymen upon a community which deliberately rejected them three cen- turies ago. No doubt many of the changes introduced by the Oxford Movement into Anglican worship are now generally accepted ; but the forcing of unaccustomed and illegal ritual upon unwilling congregations can only be justified by a view of the Church and its authority which is impossible to one who has absorbed anything of the spirit of M. Loisy or the Italian Modernists. The worst feature in the outlook is the decline in the supply of able candidates for orders. The scanty supply of well-educated and broad-minded clergymen is the chief 116 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM obstacle to the growth of devout and reason- able religious Liberalism among the laity. The decline of Church-going among educated laymen and the unwillingness of educated men to take orders advance together : they act and react upon one another. Men will not go to Church to hear views about the damnation of heretics, 1 about the Fall, about the Atone- ment, about Absolution and Sacraments which they have ceased to believe ; or, on the other hand, to listen to discourses so moderate that it is impossible to discover what the preacher really thinks about just the questions which interest thoughtful people. Clerical vocations seldom emerge out of families in which the father and mother have ceased to attend 1 I have just come back from hearing in an Oxford Church a sermon by a very young man in which it was clearly taught that " Arms, Socinus, and all the wretched heretics of the present day " would be damned everlastingly. That is the sort of thing which is emptying the Churches. The sermon disclosed amazing ignorance of the simplest critical facts, and not one single spark of Christian Charity or even of religious feeling. I mention this trifling fact lest it should be said that teaching of this type is quite obsolete. It is happily obsolescent. CLERICAL LIBERALISM 117 Church, and in which the clergy are never mentioned with intellectual respect. But nothing is more useless than mere lamentation over the decline of rational Religion. Enough has been said, perhaps, to suggest to those whom the vast practical activities of the ecclesiastical machine do not blind to the plain facts of the case that we are approaching, if we have not reached, an intel- lectual crisis precisely similar to that which is going on upon the continent. The most cheering event of our times has been the growth of a liberal religious movement — pro- foundly religious as well as liberal — among the clergy of France and Italy. The Papacy has done what it could to crush that movement. Our ecclesiastical rulers do not possess similar powers of repression : but they are very power- ful notwithstanding, and we have a right to look to them not merely for abstinence from such manifestos as the recent Encyclical, but for some positive help in the task of theo- logical reconstruction. In trying to answer 118 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the question " What can be done ? I am thinking especially of the things which seem to require combined and corporate effort, and which most distinctly demand the leadership and assistance of the Bishops and other highly placed ecclesiastics. If the kind of theological reconstruction of which 1 am thinking neces- sarily involved the holding of what are com- monly considered advanced liberal opinions, it would, of course, be useless to look to the present episcopal bench for help ; but the sort of obsolete teaching of which we most want to get rid is teaching in which few of our Bishops really believe. For our immediate purpose, at least a third of the Bishops may be regarded as Liberals, and a much larger number are sufficiently in touch with the spirit of their age to be quite capable of appreciating the importance of encouraging among the clergy a more open-minded attitude towards what may be conveniently called modern thought than is at present at all common. I want, in the few pages which remain to me, to CLERICAL LIBERALISM 119 suggest what they might do to counteract that alienation of educated laymen from the Church which is endangering the very existence of Christianity among us. (1) I am not one of those who expect great results of any kind from monster Assemblies of Bishops. Even among those who believe in the infallibility of such Assemblies, the more authoritative and the more intelligent opinion attaches little weight to mere numbers : it is only a " morally unanimous " vote that carries weight. In such Assemblies weight and numbers rarely go together. All the learning and the ability of the Roman Church were against the decree of Papal Infallibility, but it was carried nevertheless by the numerical pre- ponderance of the Bishops who presided over tiny dioceses in Italy or larger areas in still more backward regions. The power of such Assemblies for good is small : their power for evil is large. In the present state of opinion, the most that can be hoped for is that there will be no pronouncements tending to the 120 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM narrowing of our Church, no putting back the hands of the theological clock. With the spectacle of the Papal Encyclical before their eyes — the dismay it has produced among in- telligent Romanists and the open delight it has occasioned to the avowed enemies of all Christianity — it is to be hoped that the more liberal and learned minority of the Anglican Episcopate may at least have influence enough to stop reactionary pronouncements. Could there not even be carried some very moderate and general declaration in favour of sober and honest criticism, some repudiation of obsolete and literalist " theories of inspiration " ? Such a declaration would be of value both in defend- ing clergymen — I am not thinking merely of advanced " Liberals," but of all who accept any of the critical results at all — from charges of dishonesty, and of convincing "the plain man " that, when an individual clergyman assures him that the acceptance of such and such a position is compatible with Christianity and Churchmanship, he is not expressing CLERICAL LIBERALISM 121 merely a private opinion, but one generally recognised in the Church. Even if such a declaration were proposed and supported by a considerable minority of the Bishops, it would be a valuable note of progress to set off against the calamitous defiance of all modern thought by the Pope, and the silent, if unwilling, acquiescence of the Roman Episcopate. The general public know enough of the way Bishops are made to be aware that the prelates whose opinions on such matters really count are usually a minority. (2) But it is chiefly as individuals that the more liberal Bishops can help those who are struggling to emancipate the Church from the dead-weight of obsolete opinion. The most obvious way in which they can do this is by placing no difficulties in the way of liberal- minded candidates for orders. There are already many Bishops to whom we could send such men with little fear of their rejection. Some of the most personally orthodox prelates are, it is right to acknowledge, very tolerant 122 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM in this and in other ways. But something more than bare toleration of liberal opinions is wanted if the right kind of men are to be encouraged to take orders. The general feeling among the abler undergraduates who are possible candidates for orders is that the whole weight of Church opinion — of the Bishops, of the clergy, of all recognised organs and representatives of Church opinion — is dead against the honest facing of intellectual diffi- culties, against the honest recognition of the results of liberal criticism and modern thought. This affects them in two ways. It makes them doubt the honesty of taking orders, and still more it puts them out of sympathy with the whole institution. They cannot feel much enthusiasm for a Ministry in which they will be made to feel that they are at best tolerated outsiders. When we remember the enormous power of calling attention to their utterances which Bishops possess — by preach- ing, by visitation charges, by writing — it can- not be said that they have done much to diffuse CLERICAL LIBERALISM 123 a liberal and thoughtful theology among the laity, or to encourage the more intelligent candidates for orders. We have at least some six or seven English Bishops whose theological opinions are as liberal as those of Bishop Moorhouse, who recently resigned the see of Manchester. Among the present Arch- bishops and Bishops there are some to whom Liberals owe some gratitude, but hardly one of them has " spoken out," or used his influence to encourage liberally - minded clergymen, as he did. Too often, when an enlightened and scholarly divine becomes a Bishop, his principal ambition seems to be — by his appointments, by fulminations about " distinctive Church teaching " or " the Canon Law," by denouncing little irregularities of a non-ritualistic character, by vague talk about the Catholic Church, and at all events by scrupulous silence on every question upon which inquiring Churchmen might naturally look to him for guidance, to persuade his clergy— and particularly the ultra-sacerdotalist 124 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM section of them — that he (the Bishop) is not so black as he has been painted. The clergy naturally take their cue from the Bishops. The more reactionary a young clergyman is, the more boldly and blatantly he airs his crude opinions about Confession, the Church, the Sacraments. The more intelligent his opinions, the more he is tempted to take refuge in vague platitudes which will offend no one. (3) The real strength of Anti-liberalism in the Church is to be found in the theological colleges. It is in the long run the Seminaries that have ruined the Church of Rome. You have only to contrast the state of clerical opinion (till recently) in Italy with its state in Catholic Germany, the state of the clerical mind in the Church of England with the tone of the Scotch Presbyterian Churches, to appreciate the difference between a theological education in a university and a theological education in a Seminary. A Scotch candidate for the ministry spends four years in studying theology under a variety of professors — all CLERICAL LIBERALISM 125 men of fairly advanced years and real learn- ing in some special branch of theology, often scholars of European reputation. They are men of different opinions, some of them prob- ably decidedly liberal, all of them scholars who approach the subject with a desire for intellectual thoroughness. In a word, the instruction is eminently " wissenschaftlich." An English candidate for orders (if he be a university man) goes (generally for one year) to a college of twenty or thirty men, where a Principal and one or two other teachers — the latter often very young men, chosen for ability no doubt, but also for their loyalty to a party creed — attempt to teach all branches of theology. With the best will in the world, it would not be possible to communicate any adequate knowledge of scientific theology, to initiate men into the spirit of theological research, to lay any adequate basis for future study in one year, much interrupted (perhaps rightly) by very frequent services, religious addresses, retreats, and devotional exercises of 126 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM various kinds, and by some amount of practical work. And, as a matter of fact, the type of theology taught at the larger and more popular theological colleges is, for the most part, an advanced Sacerdotalism. I do not deny that sometimes the elementary principles and results of criticism are taught — probably not without a little " economy." But all that I have heard, and hear, of the training which these colleges supply suggests that their atmosphere is uncongenial to thought, to freedom, to inquiry. They foster an intensely ecclesiastical spirit. At best the interest of the men is absorbed by the purely practical and devotional side of Religion : at the worst attention is concentrated upon the distinctive tenets of a strongly partisan theology. Often there is considerable pressure put upon the student to go to confession, and the importance or efficacy of Priestly Absolution is constantly insisted upon. They tend to inspire a sense not merely of the dignity and sacredness of the clerical vocation, but of the vast CLERICAL LIBERALISM 127 difference between Priest and layman. For this state of things it is impossible not to hold the Bishops partially responsible. Most of the colleges are entirely or partly under episcopal control. Yet how often the Principal or Vice-principal whom a Bishop appoints to his theological college is a higher and narrower Churchman than himself! One or two of the more liberal Bishops have attempted to set up small theological schools of a more moderate and reasonable complexion. The best results have followed from these efforts : but it may be doubted whether there exists in all England a theological college in which the tone is as enlightened, as intellectual, as liberal as it is in the seminary of a certain modernising French Archbishop. In ways like these the Bishops might help us. Of course some of the things I have asked for can only be expected from those Bishops whose own theological opinions are more de- cidedly liberal ; but there are few of their lord- ships who do not more or less appreciate the 128 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM value of an intellectually open state of mind, of the desire to know, of the desire honestly to face difficulties. Let it be remembered that the repression of opinion — the rejection of a candidate for orders, the denunciation of some clergyman for holding a certain opinion, the worrying of an incumbent into resignation, the withdrawal of a curate's licence, the passing over of Liberals in the distribution of patron- age, the encouragement given to some hope- lessly ignorant and incompetent piece of apologetics — exercises a depressing and deter- rent effect which is not confined to those who hold the particular view which may be in question. When a thoughtful undergraduate hears from a Bishop in the pulpit that a man who does not believe the Virgin Birth or the personality of the Devil cannot be a Christian, or at all events a clergyman, it is not only the man who has definitely rejected those beliefs, but the man who realises the difficulty of the questions who is discouraged. He may know that the latter opinion involves philosophical CLERICAL LIBERALISM 129 difficulties, while the former raises a host of critical questions upon whi^h Christian scholars are divided, and he does not know what effect further study (before or after his ordination at twenty-three) may have upon his mind. If he is told that one answer to the question will ruin his clerical career, he is dissuaded from thinking further of holy orders. There are much less " advanced " pieces of Liberalism than doubts about the Virgin Birth which induce men to give up the idea of being ordained, and which would have no such effect if they could hear from a Bishop — in public — that they constitute no valid objection to ordination ; nay, that they are (as is very likely the case) shared by the Bishop himself. I have no hesitation in saying that some of the episcopal sermons we have heard in Oxford, however excellent on the purely practical side, have by their intellectual — or anti-intellectual — tone done much to discourage thoughtful men from becoming clergymen. And, after all, it is not 9 130 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM only possible clergymen who have souls. The thoughtful layman, intending to remain a layman, might often be helped to remain a Christian if he could feel that those who represent the Church had got some kind of an answer to the difficulties which he feels. And yet it must be admitted that the limits of what can be done for our cause by persons in authority are soon reached. It was not by episcopal support that the Oxford Movement won its short-lived influence among the educated laity, or its present ascendancy among the clergy. I do not for a moment suppose — I am not sure that I desire— a similar triumph for a liberal "party." The very success of a liberal party dooms it to extinction. As soon as an opinion becomes common, it ceases to be thought distinctively liberal. When they see the extent to which the opinions which forty or even twenty years ago were regarded as liberal almost beyond the limits of toleration have already leavened the Church, Liberals need have no fear as to the CLERICAL LIBERALISM 131 continuous advance of clerical opinion. That in a country like England — where (in spite of theological colleges, of clergy-houses, and of "religious orders") the clergy are in contact with the ordinary currents of lay opinion, and breathe the atmosphere of free discussion — there will ultimately be all the liberty we want as regards criticism, and the theological questions which can be affected by critical opinions — of this I have no doubt whatever. The danger is that by the time that result is accomplished the alienation of ordinary lay thought and feeling from the clergy and " the Churches " will be too complete to be restored, and that a better understanding may still be impeded by an ecclesiasticism of tone and sentiment which will have survived the theology that gave it birth. If the laity lose the habit of Church-going, able and liberal sermons in the empty churches will no more restore it than they do in Protestant Germany. If the idea that the position of a clergyman is a suitable one for men who 132 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM might attain high success in other profes- sions once disappears, the Bishops of the future will appeal in vain for such candidates. Able men will not care to adopt a calling which has lost its influence. If these results are to be averted, there must be more boldness, more effort, and a more missionary spirit among us. If everyone would really teach up to the level of his own knowledge and conviction, the battle would be won. There must be more co-operation between the more moderate and the more advanced Liberals. We must not be eager to accuse of heresy those who go a little further than ourselves, or to disparage as narrow and illiberal those who do not go so far. It is the simplest and most universally ad- mitted liberal principles that most want teaching and propagating. On the negative side it is the most universally abandoned positions that most want disclaiming. On the positive side it is the most essential truths of Theism and the Christian revelation that should fill the largest place in our teaching. CLERICAL LIBERALISM 133 The eventual triumph of Liberalism — on its destructive side — in the world at large is certain: the triumph of Liberal Christianity, or even Liberal Religion, is, alas ! not so well assured. Liberalism will triumph, whether the clergy become liberal or not. That any form of Religion can exercise a wide influence without a clergy to teach it, history supplies us with no reason for supposing. Liberal Religion cannot prevail without a liberal clergy. " Like Priest, like People." What changes we ought to agitate for in the formulas or organisation of the Church it hardly belongs to this article to consider. The dis- crepancy between real opinion and apparent profession, the inevitableness of which I have admitted, is not a good thing in itself. We ought to try and diminish it. For the imme- diate present, I suggest that our objects should be — the optional use of the Athanasian Creed ; the substitution of a promise to use the Prayer Book for the declaration of assent ; the substitu- tion in the Ordinal of the milder answer about 134 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the Bible required of priests for the stronger one demanded of deacons ; the removal of a few admittedly obsolete forms and expressions from the Prayer Book. We shall not get even these things in a day. But the agitation for them will do good. The time may come when the proposal to substitute the original Nicene Creed (in which the clauses that most trouble conscience are absent) for the present Constantinopolitan formula may receive a re- spectful hearing ; but that day is not to-day. Perhaps it may be to-morrow. LAY LIBERALISM BY Professor PERCY GARDNER The layman who writes as a liberal in Church matters represents an immense constituency. Liberal clergymen are in a minority, though by no means in a contemptible minority, among their brethren. But it is safe to say that at all events among lay churchmen who have been to a good school and who read something beside the newspaper, the great majority are in some sense liberal. In some sense is emphatic ; because liberalism may take many forms, good and bad. Too often it takes the form of indifference, or of carping criticism : this is the Charybdis into which those who avoid the Scylla of ecclesiasticism often fall. I have no claim to represent the ecclesiastically- 135 136 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM minded layman, and I have no wish to repre- sent the indifferent layman. But I intend to try to represent the point of view of the lay- man to whom religion is a reality, not the whole of life, but its noblest and most ideal side, who thinks of his church with a stir of emotion, and realises how poverty-stricken his life would be without it, who is determined that his children shall enjoy the religious privi- leges which he has himself enjoyed, who feels, as he grows elderly, a constantly increasing tendency to lean upon the common life of the Church, and to face the problems of our time in the Anglican ranks. i. But is not this the attitude of conservatism ? Does any large number of the faithful laity desire far- going reforms ? Are churchmen not content to remain as they are ? It seems to me strange that these questions should even be put. On whichever side we look, we see great changes going on, and still greater up- LAY LIBERALISM 137 heavals threatening. In politics the state of matters is very unstable. A secularist socialist party is growing stronger and stronger. We see the utmost unrest among the nations of the Continent, and Asia is growing every year more impatient of European predominance. And in religion everything seems in a flux ; manners changing, Sunday observance dying down, vast masses of the people becoming mere indifferent spectators of the life of religion, secularism invading the school, and parents throwing aside all responsibility for the religious training of their children. No one who really considers the signs of the times can cherish a light heart as regards the future of the Church ; while to those who are naturally unhopeful the days may well seem like those days before the Flood, when men ate and drank and married, until the heavy hand of God fell on them suddenly. We see the forces of dissolution working everywhere ; and we see the forces of con- servatism gathered together against them ; and 138 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM in some places — in Russia, in politics ; at Rome, in religion — for the time, triumphant and determined to crush the enemy. Few times have there been when to advocate moderate and reasonable reforms would seem so hopeless. Yet it is moderate and reasonable reforms which we of the English Church are bound to advocate. The English nation is one of the most conservative and slow - moving of all nations. And the English Church is, by the facts of its origin and history, strongly asso- ciated with this side of the national character. One may fairly say that the cause of moder- ation is the cause of our Church, that the via media is the only way open to her. If so, then surely for us of all people there is a necessity for consideration of moderate reforms which may make the Church better suited to the needs of the new time. It is saddening to see to what matters many of our most attached and earnest members give the talents which should lead us in the ways of adaptation to the age. Many of them LAY LIBERALISM 139 are constantly discussing the possibility of reunion, and making absurd advances to the Roman or the Greek Churches, which meet with no response. The fact is that at present reunion would mean the abandonment of causes for which our ancestors have lived and died during four centuries. Others are taken up with questions about the use of vestments or of incense, or the reservation of the Sacra- ment. An Anglican Bishop has just pub- lished a book discussing the five species or stages of elevation in the Eucharist, and ex- amining the question which of them are primi- tive or permissible. Others vehemently object even to the least modification of the Athanasian Creed, oblivious of the fact that the presence of the creed in the service keeps multitudes of English churchmen (however unreasonably) away from church at many of the festivals. It is quite useless to discuss the question of reform in the Church of England, unless we may assume, in the first place, that reform is desirable ; and, in the second place, that reform 140 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM should be in the direction of bringing the Church nearer to the best religious life of the people, not in the direction of some fancied approximation to primitive usage or the for- mulae of the sixteenth century. After all, the more we consider the position of other branches of the Church of Christ, the more we shall realise our inestimable advan- tages. On one side we see the Roman Church, with its newly - revived inquisition and its avowed determination to put an end to all liberty of thought. On the other side we see the smaller Protestant churches drifting hither and thither, and welcoming the wildest aberrations in thought and practice. We cling the more closely to our Church, and feel the enormous advantages it can claim. In the first place, it is free and comprehensive, allow- ing wide latitude of views even to the clergy, so that a pastor who is really useful and de- voted will seldom be called in question for any breadth of opinion, or for any views as to ritual, unless he is intolerant of the differing LAY LIBERALISM 141 views of others. In the second place, it is national, representing the English race on its most characteristic side, — a slow-minded race, with a strong belief in truth and righteousness, not given to the pursuit of distant ideals, but eager to do what is right under the present circumstances ; a race accessible to literature and poetry, but without much feeling for art ; a tolerant, quiet, and manly people, with a faculty for command. In the third place, it lies close to the facts of personal religion, in- terposing no sacerdotal class between the souls of men and God, but trying to bring the worshipper and the Worshipped into close relations. In all its services such great spiritual realities as sin and pardon, atonement and holi- ness, the desire of a better life and cravings for divine aid, are made the main theme. It fully realises that the Church can only provide the opportunity ; the real work of salvation lies between the soul and its Maker. And, in the fourth place, it has historic justification ; it is a great stem of the Christian tree, drawing sap 142 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM from the roots, connected by a never broken tradition with the early history of Christianity, a reservoir to contain all that the merits of saints and heroes in the past have contributed to the richness of spiritual life in our later days. I have said that reform must lie in the direction not of any fancied return to authori- tative usage, but in the direction of giving wider scope to the best spiritual forces of the age. If I may be allowed, without arrogance, to criticise from this point of view the line taken by far better men than myself, I will venture to say that I regard as foredoomed to failure the attempts of some excellent men among the clergy to attract the people by im- posing ritual and elaborate symbolism. The Englishman is scarcely to be approached from that side. I do not say it in praise of the national tendencies, rather in dispraise ; but, as an archaeologist, I have long discovered that as a nation we are singularly devoid of feeling for art and ceremony. From the Eton LAY LIBERALISM 143 boy to the intelligent artisan we have a certain contempt for " flummery " ; and we must be approached through the intelligence. Hence no line of action could be worse adapted to its environment than the tendency among High Church clergy to depreciate preaching and make everything of sacraments, to substitute symbolism for discussion. None of our bishops is more practical than the Bishop of Stepney, who in a recent work 1 earnestly advocates appeals to the people by means of sermons and addresses and every kind of discourse. This seems to me the only hopeful way of approaching them. We may appeal to the parallel case of University Extension. It is proved by a long experience that the English working classes are thoroughly accessible to every teacher in secular matters who can prove to them that he is an authority in his subject. The extension lecturers gain an influence, both wide and deep, and are readily listened to in such matters as ethics and social organisation. 1 The Opportunity of the Church of England. 144 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Nor have their auditors any prejudice against authority : the fact that the teachers are authorised and recognised by a great Uni- versity lies at the root of the trust imposed in them by the Trades Unions and other such bodies. Surely these things are a parable. Nothing could show more clearly how far the sacramentalist clergy have drifted from contact with present needs and existing cir- cumstances than the indifference which they have generally shown to the rapidly progressing secularisation of the Sunday. Now, whatever may be the case in past ages and in other countries, there can be no doubt that, owing to historic reasons, the Sunday as an institution is the foundation-stone of religion in England and Scotland. If it goes, there is nothing which can ever take its place. This, not ritual or vestments, is the test stantis aut cadentis ecclesice. But until lately, at all events, there has been a tendency among a school of clergy almost to sympathise with the con- LAY LIBERALISM 145 stantly-growing custom of the people to make Sunday a mere day of amusement. Let us, however, assume that some reforms of the kind I have tried to indicate are de- sirable. What are the matters ecclesiastic in which laymen are most concerned ? I think them to be two : first the Prayer Book and church services ; secondly, social work. Let us briefly consider each of these, trying to dis- cern in each a course of reform at once liberal, and faithful to the spirit of the Christian Church. ii. Without being in full sympathy with the rapid changes and feverish activities of our time, one may feel that any institution which tries to remain stationary in a moving world stands at a very great disadvantage. In a cen- tury our habits, our tastes, our intellectual atmo- sphere are so greatly altered, that it is impos- sible that the services which met the needs of our great-grandfathers should meet ours also. 10 1*6 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM They could hardly be suitable to the sleepy and conservative Georgian age and to the twentieth century. This has, of course, been generally felt ; and our services have been altered. The music has become brighter, the hymns more varied, more ritual and ceremony has been introduced. The sermon has been shortened, and has gained in actuality. These changes are doubtless, on the whole, an im- provement ; but they are in only one direction. They show adaptation to the views of a clergy which has been deeply affected by the Anglican revival of the middle of the last century, as well as to the impatience, the need of stimulus, the desire for what is bright and stirring, which so deeply marks young people in these days. But what has been done to promote intelligent thought on the great problems of religion, a deep and steady spiritual life, a consecration of progress to Christian purposes ? The habit of attending early Communions has spread, and to this other services have been in some degree sacrificed. Can it be said that these LAY LIBERALISM 147 other services stand now at a much higher level in the matters of Christian thought and emotion than they did fifty years ago ? It may be that we have not gone back, we may even have improved : but compare such pro- gress, if there be progress, with the advances which have been made in every branch of secular knowledge. In truth, the ignorance of things religious in which the children, not only of the poor but of the well-to-do, grow up is appalling. I know that my most valuable possession, during all my life, has been the knowledge of the Bible imparted to me on Sunday afternoons by my mother. Few parents now instruct their children in religious knowledge ; they pass on the task to the schoolmaster, who, in turn, hands on the responsibility to the clergyman. But the clergyman has fifty other things to do, and he may not have a gift for instructing the young. In any case, he is very unlikely to impart such a love of the Bible and of religion as one acquires in a religious home. Still, the 148 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM fact remains that the duty of the intelligent setting forth of religious fact and Christian history is thrown more and more on the clergy, and they do not usually seem to regard this duty with the seriousness which its importance demands. Quis custodiet custodes ? Some kind of revision of the Prayer Book has, I think, become necessary. 1 At the same time one almost trembles at the suggestion. One foresees endless clashing between schools and views. One dreads losing what one most values in the Prayer Book ; and still more one dreads the insertion of what would be painful, and contrary to the history and the spirit of the English Church. As a reformed com- munion we have behind us a life of three centuries and a half, and in that time we have formed a character which is part of the character of the English people, and the loss of which would be the prelude to total destruction. 1 Since writing this paper I have read an article on " Re- vision," by Canon Beeching, in the October number of the Church Quarterly Review. I agree with it in almost every point. LAY LIBERALISM 149 Yet I venture to think that a revision of the Prayer Book would be, not merely possible, but even not difficult, if each of the great parties in the Church would make up its mind that the preservation of the unity of the Church is an end worth striving for, and that this unity can only be preserved by self-sacrifice. If each party would but agree to a self-denying ordinance, and waive all attempt to alter the Prayer Book in its own special direction, rather preserving the balance and compromise upon which it was originally founded, then changes could be made to which only prejudice and stupidity could object. For it seems perfectly clear that there is much in our services which is obviously im- provable. We are so used to what we hear as often as we enter a church, and it is bound up so closely with our own history and the emo- tions which twine around our history, that we easily allow much that strikes a stranger with astonishment. Imagine an intelligent Indian or Japanese entering a church, and hearing our 150 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM gentlewomen and carefully nurtured children singing, " Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow : let his children be vaga- bonds, and beg their bread. . . . Let there be no man to pity him, nor to have compassion upon his fatherless children." Would not our visitor feel thankful that in Buddhist temples no such imprecations would be possible ? If a member of another of the Reformed churches wandered into one of our cathedrals to see how we celebrated the birthday of the Saviour, he might well hear us repeating all about the raiment of needlework and the gift of the daughter of Tyre. " What in the world," he would say, " has this to do with the birth of Christ ? It is a marriage song, perhaps, of one of the kings of Judah : but surely we are not assembled to celebrate a marriage." And to me it seems scarcely less incongruous, that at the most solemn service of the Church, when all hearts are lifted up so far as their nature allows, we find ourselves reciting at great length the prohibitions of the Jewish decalogue, LAY LIBERALISM 151 one at least of which our Master deliberately and intentionally set aside, while others are sufficiently enforced by the criminal law. No doubt, in these cases and many others, good churchmen do not take the words of the service in any literal sense ; they transform them by religious feeling into something Christian. They think that it is sin, not the sinner, that we condemn in those terrible Psalms ; and that the decalogue may be widened to include most sins of action and even thought. Yet why lay such a burden upon our shoulders, a burden which is borne by no other branch of the Christian Church ? And there is also a great danger in the feeling of unreality which comes from constantly using words in a fanciful sense. The result is that even the most solemn and appropriate of prayers often glide over the surface of the minds of attendants at a service, " like a tale of little meaning, though the words be strong." We acquire the notion that words used in Church are used in a non-natural sense, and 152 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM that we may leave them behind at the porch, passing out into a life with which they have little in common. No doubt, if such a revision of the Prayer Book were attempted, that its general broad character were altered, the results would be dis- astrous. If the High Church party succeeded in seriously altering the character of the Communion Service in a sacerdotal direction, or if the Broad Church party succeeded in omitting the creeds, 1 the result would be, and must be, disastrous ; indeed, such changes must bring disruption. Would any wise and loyal churchman advocate such changes ? Speaking for myself, I must say that though I belong to the advanced school of criticism, and could find reason to object to many things in the daily services, yet I should be very sorry to see any changes made which would unfit them for the expression of the religious 1 That is, the shorter creeds. As to the Athanasian Creed, it is the object of profound dislike to the great mass of the laity ; and its removal most desirable. The Church of Ireland gets on quite well without it. LAY LIBERALISM 153 feelings and hopes of the general body of worshippers. They are meant, not for the few, but for the many. The man who cannot join in forms of worship with which his heart is in sympathy because of critical doubts, or because he dislikes certain details of ritual, is a man to be pitied. But there are changes in the services of the Church which would involve no question of doctrine, but merely adaptation to a changed intellectual and moral atmosphere. Is it impossible that all parties should assent to some of these alterations, leaving the larger questions of Church practice and doctrine for a time when there may be more general agree- ment ? Let me mention a few of them. 1. The Old Testament lectionary for Sun- days and Festivals is still very unsatisfactory. Many chapters selected for Sunday reading, especially in the months of August and September, seem most perversely chosen ; while many of the finest passages in the Bible are never heard in Sunday services. The 154 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM reason of this is not obscure : those who made the selection did not go by the intrinsic worth of various sections of the Bible, but regarded them in the light of views as to history prophecy and symbolical interpretation, which no longer have any adherents among scholars. Any group of Biblical experts, however selected, could not fail to make a better selection of passages than the present. The same thing holds of the selection of special Psalms for Festivals : the Psalms were not usually chosen as being in harmony with the spirit of the Festival, but as containing certain verses which could be regarded as prophetic in the obsolete sense of the word. 2. The Church of England is, I believe, the only Church in Christendom which goes through the whole of the Psalms in her public services. I am not speaking of the use in monasteries or of such esoteric services. For all time the Psalms must remain among the most valuable embodiments of the spirit of worship. They are the Church's jewels ; but LAY LIBERALISM 155 they vary greatly, — in date, in character, and in appropriateness to a Christian service. Moreover, they are in extent too great to be satisfactorily included in the services of a month. The omission of a third, or even half, of them would be a far greater gain than loss. 3. Of the special services of the Church, some perhaps could not be altered without bringing in the question of doctrine. But two seem free from this difficulty, the marriage service and that of burial. To improve the former would be easy, even if it were ap- proached only from the side of good sense and good manners, and if no really religious question were raised. The burial service seems to me quite one of the least successful parts of the Prayer Book. One must appre- ciate the difficulties of the compilers, who had to remove Mediaeval views decisively rejected by the conscience of the nation ; and it was very difficult to do so without taking away the life of the service. They fell back on St Paul. In our day we could surely wish that 156 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM that great apostle should less completely dominate our burials with his sublime but sometimes out of date theories of the future life, based as they were on an expectation of the almost immediate Second Coming of his Master. The spirit of the occasional prayers in the services for the sick and the dying is admirable, and in every way worthy of the Church ; a few prayers of the same kind intro- duced into the burial service, with the omission of part of the long Pauline passage, would greatly improve and enrich it. At present its severe coldness is almost appalling. 4. One scarcely dares to suggest that even out of present materials it would be possible to arrange services of more variety and greater interest than those in present use. Many of the most beautiful prayers in the Prayer Book are heard but once a year, while others are staled by constant repetition, in season and out of season. This applies still more to the Can- ticles. Surely the imagination of the Church is not so stunted, nor her power of utterance LAY LIBERALISM 157 so closely limited, that we need sing every morning of our lives about the days of tempta- tion in the wilderness, as the only possible introduction to Christian worship. We need alternative services suited to various occasions and various audiences. Perhaps experience does not warrant us in thinking that our bishops and deans are able to compose suitable prayers, like the divines of the sixteenth cen- tury. But even so, it would be easy to add to the storehouse of the Prayer Book, already rich, many prayers from old liturgies. And it would be taking a very low view of the faculties of the clergy to regard them as wholly unfit to introduce from time to time written or extem- porary prayers of their own composition. The Prayer Book contains much beside the services of the Church, Creeds, Articles of Religion, and the like. But of these a layman need not speak ; they mainly concern the clergy. What is really in the interests of laymen is that nothing in the way of Creed or Article should be so tightly interpreted as to 158 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM exclude from the ministry men who have a real vocation for it. It is well known that under the influence of Dean Stanley greater generality was introduced into the formula of assent to the Prayer Book imposed on the clergy. This concession has been beyond value : it is of the utmost importance to make sure that no bishop ventures to re-introduce into his own diocese a more rigid formula of assent. Such an attempt can only be a usurpation. If the Church chooses, as a whole, to make pronouncement in such matters, that is another matter : but no bishop has any right to assume that he can in his own diocese speak with the voice of the community. I do not propose to speak of ritual and vest- ments. It is a subject in which most laymen take very little interest. They would be quite content to leave the matter to the clergy, if it were not that they know that the clergy value these things for their symbolism, and that the doctrines involved in the symbolism are exactly the doctrines to which they have the strongest LAY LIBERALISM 159 objection. For this reason they cannot be indifferent. Nor do I think that anything has more tended to foster the notion that church is a place for women and children, but not for men, than the emphasis laid by so many of the clergy on symbolic ritual. Surely if there be one matter to which St Paul's principle of concession to the feelings of others applies, it is this matter of ritual. Nothing is a more frequent cause of offence, and nothing could be in itself of less importance. m. Turning next to the question of the work of the Church, I must express my satisfaction that in some of the papers issued by the Com- mittees of the Pan- Anglican Congress, a strong desire is expressed that laymen should take a larger share in the direction and furtherance of church activity. It is seen that one of the greatest dangers of the Church is the present apathy of the layman, who seems ready to stand aside, and allow everything to be done 160 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM and arranged by the clergy. No one can doubt that it is most desirable to make the layman feel that he has an interest in the matter, and that this interest is in danger of suffering. I would suggest that the best, and indeed the only, way to overcome the apathy of the laity is to assign to them more responsi- bility, to give them a real working share in the Church, and to be willing to accept their views even when they are not altogether agreeable to the clergy. If a clergyman wants to find docile disciples, who will accept his views and follow his lead submissively, he may find such ; but they will not be men of character or in- telligence. Englishmen are not imaginative, and they are apt not to be interested in any matter unless they have some control of it. But the moment they have a voice in deter- mining courses of action, they are likely to become keener and keener. Such is the psychology of the matter. Would it not be well to try to draw in the laity, by establishing church councils, to which may be submitted LAY LIBERALISM 161 not merely questions of business, but even of the manner of conducting services ? The result would be undoubtedly to diminish the gap, which at present seems widening, between clergy and laity. The Church might again become, what in many places it is ceasing to be, the Church of the people. I may add that I have watched such a council lately, and think that its action has been decidedly bene- ficent. But as things are, it has no real power. In regard to the social work of the Church the place of the layman is still clearer and his aid more imperatively needed. In recent years there has arisen a strong wave of what may be called in no hostile phrase the passion of materialist altruism, which has flooded all the countries of Europe and America. There has grown on all sides a conviction that the life of the poor, especially in our great cities, is far less happy than it ought to be and might be. And a desire of increasing that happiness, of giving a better 11 162 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM and less degraded existence to the toiling millions, has come to dominate the life of thousands of our younger men. The means to this end they often catch at hastily — passion is notable for blinding the eyes ; — whence a great deal of evil as well as of good has arisen out of a sympathy in itself wholly humane. No Church can stand outside this trend of public feeling ; and it is not strange that it has deeply affected the clergy and the laity of the English Church. The danger is that it may too com- pletely dominate the clergy, so that they may come to consider the relief of the poor as their main function, and for it in some degree neglect their more spiritual function. No doubt the clergy, in their exceptional position, are able to do great service in helping the poor. But Christianity as a religion is based on the view that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth ; and the man who gives up that view gives up his Master. After all, the great duty of the clergy is to keep before people the L/.Y LIBERALISM 163 supreme reality of the spiritual life : that is their function, and if they subordinate it to any other enthusiasm, however excellent in itself, society will suffer irretrievably. Can anyone turn, however hastily, the pages of Christian history, without seeing that the whole spring of it lies in the value set on the im- material as compared with the material ? People say that until the masses reach a certain level of comfort they cannot be Christian. However keenly one may sympathise with those who desire to raise the level of material existence, one must remember that Christianity grew to maturity in the slums of ancient cities, slums compared with which the worst districts of London and Liverpool are paradises. Have the poorest of the poor ever fasted or lived as hardly as Christian anchorites ? We must not allow ourselves to be misled by cant in this matter. Physical comfort may be a more desirable thing than religious peace — that is a common view, though not a Christian view ; but physical discomfort does not exclude 164 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM religious peace — that is as certain as the fact that the world revolves round the sun. There is much social organising of an inno- cent kind which commonly falls on the clergy, especially in country places, such work as form- ing boys' brigades and arranging evening read- ings and lectures. This is, of course, excellent ; and it greatly helps the purely religious side of a clergyman's influence by putting him on friendly terms with his neighbours. But when we come to the organisation of charitable relief we reach something very different, and infin- itely more easy to twist to bad ends. I am by no means sure that it would not be a good thing if the clergy, while taking a fair share in charitable work, would leave the main organ- isation of it to such bodies as County Councils and the Committees of the Charity Organisa- tion Society. In hundreds of parishes the action of the clergy tends to degrade the poor by spoiling their love of independence, and tends to substitute a mean and querulous spirit for a courageous determination to make the best LAY LIBERALISM 165 of existing circumstances. Less almsgiving and more equality between the clergy and the poor would be a better relation with a view to the religious helpfulness of the former. And I know this to be the feeling of many of the clergy themselves. I would fain end in a hopeful spirit. Nor is this difficult. For I am convinced, by a multitude of facts which have recently come under my observation, that a more moderate and reasonable spirit is spreading through the Anglican ranks. Among the clergy there is a growing feeling that the results of recent biblical criticism and research must be con- sidered, and may even bring advantage. In the year 1905 a declaration 1 in favour of a more liberal attitude towards such criticism was signed by seventeen hundred and twenty- five clergymen of the Church of England. The Broad Church party, which seemed almost extinct at the end of the last century, is show- ing fresh'life. Bishops, and even clerical papers 1 Published by A. & C. Black : 1906. 166 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM like the Guardian, are growing less narrow, and more disposed to look beyond tradition to the facts of experience and history. " A breath of morning blows." May the breath grow into a strong breeze, which may blow away the dust of centuries, and fill the sails of the Church for a fresh voyage into the misty future ! POLITICAL LIBERALISM BY Sir C. THOMAS DYKE ACLAND The Gladstonian era has now passed away. Ten years have elapsed since its close. But in considering the relation of English church- men to politics at the present moment, the fact that the greatest English statesman of the nineteenth century, who was for nearly half that century the leader of the Liberal party, was also the most eminent layman of the English Church, is one which cannot but be of the greatest significance. If there be one characteristic which, in Mr Gladstone's most complex personality, was more salient than another, it was his most de- voted attachment to the Church of England. And yet there never was a member of the 167 168 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Liberal party in whose career the fundamental principles of Liberalism were more strikingly exemplified. It should therefore not be difficult to show that attachment to the Church of England is not inconsistent with an earnest belief in Liberalism and a whole-hearted zeal for its application in politics. It may be asked, What is Liberalism ? And in what does attachment to the Church of England consist ? And to each of these questions the answer cannot but be some- what vague. " Liberalism " during the last two generations has been for the most part used to denote the opposite of " Conservatism." But that use of the word is only so far justifiable as meaning the creed of the Liberal party as distinguished from that of the Conservative party. Liberal- ism is not the opposite of Conservatism if Conservatism is intended to mean, as Con- servatives would claim that it does, the con- servation of the characteristic elements of the POLITICAL LIBERALISM 169 British Constitution. For there are very many earnest Liberals who would say that the British Constitution is much safer in the hands of the Liberal party than in the hands of their opponents in Parliament. The interpretation of the word as denoting a belief in broadening the basis of the constitu- tion, with earnest fidelity to the principles of that constitution, though vague, would be far more accurate. One of the most remarkable illustrations of this occurred in 1867, when the Conservative party, led by Mr Disraeli, after having for many years thwarted the efforts of their opponents to extend the suffrage, suddenly resolved to "dish the Whigs" by going straight for household suffrage in towns, which was a complete " volte face " from the position that they had up to that time unswervingly maintained in defence of the constitution. It would be difficult to defend that step from a truly Conservative point of view. For though, from a purely party point of view, 170 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM it may have " dished the Whigs," the step was in harmony with Liberal, and not with Con- servative, principles. The old Whig watchword, " Civil and Religious Liberty," though not always an accurate description of the practice of the Whig party, does certainly describe shortly but truly the principles and practice of their Parliamentary successors, the Liberal party, of which Mr Gladstone was the founder, and to the end of his life the real leader, and it may be fairly claimed as a true description of the aims of " Political Liberalism " at the present day. In the Contemporary Review for January 1908, the Rev. J. D. Sinclair, in an excellent article upon Liberalism and Christianity, has pointed out that " Liberalism finds its main arguments in principles which lie in the mind itself, while Conservatism is preoccupied with institutions which are a part of the existing order of things that the Conservative leader stands, so to speak, within the institu- POLITICAL LIBERALISM 171 tions, and looks critically at the principles, while the Liberal leader stands within the prin- ciples, and looks critically at the institutions— the one teaching, by implication, that the value of the principles is to preserve and strengthen the institutions, and the other that the entire value and use of the institutions is to realise the principles." Now, it can hardly be denied that the English churchman, as such, stands within an institution ; but the very essence of that institu- tion is that it should realise the principle which lies at the very bottom of the whole fabric of Liberalism, viz., the promotion of free respon- sible citizenship upon the Christian basis, — " Do unto others as you would that they should " " do unto you." The English churchman feels, at the bottom of his heart, that the Church exists for the Glory of God, as manifested in the good of all mankind ; that, as a member of that Church, it is his duty, as far as in him lies, to promote the good of all men within his reach. 172 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Consequently, when such an issue is pre- sented to him as the disestablishment of a branch of that Church in a region in which its Establishment cannot be clearly shown to be for the good of the people of that region, he will have to be guided by the maintenance of the principle rather than by that of the institu- tion. The greater the sincerity of his church- manship, that is to say, the more deeply he believes in the principles upon which it is founded, in other words, the stronger his faith, the greater will be the courage which will guide the application of those principles in political action, and the less anxious will he be lest the Church he believes in should suffer from the consequences of such application. But the truth is that "attachment to the Church of England " has been for the most part in the United Kingdom far too generally taken to mean attachment to the so-called political principle of the Establishment of that Church. The examples, however, of Ireland and the Colonies afford ample demonstration POLITICAL LIBERALISM 173 that Establishment is not a principle of the English Church. If a principle at all, it is a political, not an ecclesiastical, principle. But, in reality, it is an institution, and not a principle. That is to say, the maintenance of the Estab- lishment of the Church, as a political applica- tion of the principles of Christianity, has ceased to justify itself on the ground of necessity, since it has become obvious that Christianity does not depend upon the Establishment of the Church for its maintenance in this country. But the Establishment may have, and in the minds of many churchmen it has, a very great value as regards the Church herself, quite apart from the Endowment with which, in the mind of the politician, it is usually linked. For one of the present characteristics of the Church of England is her comprehensiveness, i.e. the fact that within her borders there is room for many standpoints ; many aspects of truth commend themselves to different groups of her members, with equal force and sincerity 174 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM in each case, and consistently with equal loyalty to her leading principles. This is not the place, nor is it intended in this paper to discuss any of these standpoints or the aspects in which the truth is viewed from them. It is wholly unnecessary to do so when the political position alone is being considered. But very many churchmen value above all others that special characteristic, comprehen- siveness, and with such men, their attachment to the political institution of the Establishment of the Church by law is not in any sense due to a conservative value of the institution as such, but to their conviction as Liberals that a principle most dear to their hearts is best realised and preserved by its means. They have a fear, which is far from being un- reasonable, that the emancipation of the Church from the State control, to which, by her being Established, she is inevitably subject, would result in the loss of that breadth and compre- hensiveness which keeps her borders wide enough to secure a freedom of thought, a liberty POLITICAL LIBERALISM 175 of prophesying, for which it is at present hard to devise any other guarantee. There are various aspects of this fact. It is true as regards clergy and laity alike. The Establishment acts to some extent upon clerical authority, to restrain it from abuse, but it also gives to the clergy who value it a certain freedom of utterance ; while, again, it gives to every subject of the King who is not, either by his own act or by some other special circum- stance, severed from the National Church, a right to the ministrations of the clergy of that Church ; every minister also is liable to civil consequences for certain ecclesiastical offences. It is therefore quite possible for one whose guiding principle is the love of individual liberty, to hold fast to a system which, in effecting the control of an institution, preserves the liberty of its individual members, on the very ground that upon the emancipation from State control which would, to some extent, follow upon the loss of State support of the institution as a whole, the individual members 176 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM of it would risk a diminution of their liberty as long as they remained attached to the in- stitution. This, then, is a fair example of what was said above, quoting from Rev. J. D. Sinclair, that a man may stand within principles, and look critically at the institution, the whole value of the institution being that it adequately realises the principles. Such a man may perhaps, as a churchman, hold somewhat lightly by the institution of the Establishment of the Church, on the ground that the institution is of real value, not to the Church, but only to the State. And there are, of course, many such church- men to whom " Establishment " seems simply a yoke, to be cast off as an incubus, and who hold that, in controlling the Church, the State is also curtailing the liberty of the individual members of the Church. And there are also many who base upon the experience gained in Ireland and in the Colonies a belief that, similarly, the home branch of the Church of POLITICAL LIBERALISM 177 England, if rendered independent alike of the control and of the support of the State, would gain in energy and vitality. Unquestionably, there is much to be said in support of such a belief. It is no doubt the conviction of most of the members of the non- conforming bodies. On the other hand, there are several very important counterbalancing considerations. For instance, there is the fact that the Church of England grew, in the same way that other parts of the constitution have grown, that it never was by any definite statute established, and yet it is as much a part of the constitution as the Crown or either House of Parliament. Again, the origin of the Diocesan and of the Parochial systems are lost in antiquity. They are parts of what has been, from the earliest times of our history, the National Church. It was stipulated in Magna Charta that the Church of England should be free and inviol- able. And when, by way of providing against Papal Supremacy, the Royal Supremacy was 12 178 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM proclaimed, that was not in any way the Establishment, or a creation, of a special branch of the Catholic Church, but rather an assertion that the final authority in things ecclesiastical, as well as in things temporal, must be the will of the nation, as expressed in the laws which it has made, or in the con- stitutional action of the Crown. In this respect the Church stands in much the same relation as any other religious body towards the State. But it is marked off from these other bodies by the Royal Supremacy, the Episcopal bench in the House of Lords, and the disability of any beneficed minister to be a member of the House of Commons. One feature, however, of the case, which is probably an " inseparable accident," if not an actual result, of " Establishment," is that, without the sanction of a Parliament, which may contain " Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Here- tics," the Church cannot alter or amend her own system, or reform any of her laws and regulations. POLITICAL LIBERALISM 179 But at this many churchmen chafe, adding it to the deadening and relaxing influence which they allege to be the inevitable result of endowment and State support ; they are inclined to cry out, " Away with Establish- ment ; let the Church be as free from the King as she is from the Pope." To them the ancient identity of the Church with the Nation, as a National Church, the freedom of private judg- ment, the practical value of the Church as a pervading religious institution, the conferring of a Christian character upon the State, are as nothing compared with the liberty of action as a corporate body free from the interference of all outside, which, in their opinion, would be gained. In the minds, then, of very many earnest churchmen the real question at issue is : Can the Church be given more liberty without in- curring the risk of losing comprehensiveness ? In the minds of many Liberals the converse question asks itself : Is the risk, which amounts almost to a certainty, of the disruption of the 180 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM corporate body, i.e. the loss of comprehensive- ness, worth the loss of the contingent increase of vitality and energy among a small propor- tion of her members, and the certain narrowing of her borders, to the exclusion of vast masses of the nation who are now reckoned among her members ? And Liberals who belong to the Church of England, or members of the Church of England who belong to the Liberal party, must have this question at the back of their minds whenever great problems of policy which in any way affect the Church arise for solution. Now, during the last three generations, churchmen have had to face three or four large questions upon which legislation has taken place in which the interests of the Church have been involved. For instance, in 1868, Mr Gladstone carried a Bill for the Abolition of Compulsory Church Rates ; in 1871, the Abolition of Tests at the Universities ; in 1874 was passed the Public Worship Regulation Act ; and, later, the Burials Bill. POLITICAL LIBERALISM 181 In 1883 there was the great dispute about the Parliamentary Oath, and since 1876 there have been various struggles over the subject of Ele- mentary Education. In every one of these cases the Conservative party have been on the side of the status quo, and have claimed to be defending the Church. Liberal churchmen, however, have, as a rule, been faithful to their party, and, as they themselves would say, also faithful to their Church. In other matters, such as Licensing Reform, and Temperance questions generally, Lord Peel, the late Arch- bishop Temple, and other prominent church- men, have taken active and important pro- gressive parts. In strictly Church matters, such as the Pluralities Acts Amendment Act, it cannot be said that churchmen generally, as such, on either side of the House, have taken any real interest. Nor in any one of these instances can it be seriously alleged that their member- ship of the Church of England has produced any marked effect in sending votes over from 182 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the Liberal benches into the lobby of their opponents. There have, on the other hand, been instances, not a few, in which the Noncon- formist vote has been almost solid without reference to party, if not quite, upon occasions when it has appeared that some principle, upon religious or other grounds, dear to them, was at stake. When, therefore, we look back over the long list of subjects which, during the three generations covered by the life of the Liberal party (as successors to the Whigs), have divided the Houses of Parliament upon party lines, it is not easy to see why membership of the Church of England should have been so constantly taken to imply membership of the Tory party, nor why it is so rare, compara- tively, to find a member of the Liberal party taking an interest in Church questions. It would have seemed, a priori, probable that, in proportion to the zealousness of his churchmanship, a member of the Church of POLITICAL LIBERALISM 183 England would be anxious to turn the whole force of the Church in the direction of social improvement, in furtherance of the kingdom of God upon earth. Instead of that, we find in popular phraseology such sarcasms as " Beer and Bible." We find the influence of the Church described as reactionary with regard to education. We find the Christian Social Union instituted within the Church to teach churchmen their duty upon social subjects. We find the mass of the country clergy voting at elections for the Conservative candidates, and it is usually taken for granted that a Liberal will be " unsound " upon Church questions. In all ordinary University con- troversy the influence of the mass of clerical M.A's. has been not only Conservative, but obstructive. A fair instance of the ordinary course of things illustrative of the above anomaly may be found in what, not many years ago, occurred with reference to elementary schools. It had become matter of common knowledge, 184 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM and no matter of surprise, that the voluntary schools of which the vast majority were Church of England schools, were very much worse equipped all round than what were then called Board schools. The minister in charge of education at the time thought it his duty, as it clearly was, in justice to the children attend- ing these " Church " schools, to insist that the schools they attended should be brought into line with the Board or Undenominational schools. He was at once assailed in every possible way as an enemy to Church schools, and as being determined to crush them out of existence. He was comforted, however, by a very great multitude of letters of thanks from clergymen and others interested in Church schools, many of whom informed him that, until the pressure so applied had begun to be severely felt, they had never been able to stir up churchmen to their responsibility to the children in attendance at their schools ; but that, under the influence of that pressure, the money had flowed in much more freely in POLITICAL LIBERALISM 185 support of the Church schools. In point of fact, the very churchmen who were the loudest in their denunciation of a policy devised in the interest of the children attending the Church schools were those who themselves, by their own neglect, had shown their indifference to that interest. But it is perhaps natural, and in the ordinary course only what we have to expect, that in the case of questions like the Abolition of Tests, which, as they only operate upon honest men. are useless for the purpose for which they are imposed, or, like the Abolition of Compulsory Church Rates, which was intended to mitigate the feeling of injustice that was rankling in the hearts of Nonconformists, the more slowly- moving among the minds of churchmen and of politicians would be found moving together. But no Liberal churchman can have doubted for a moment that in supporting these and other such reforms he was voting in the true interests of the National Church. Many very earnest churchmen have felt that on great 186 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM questions, such as the attitude of Great Britain in the face of Europe in regard to the problems that have arisen in the East, or on such ques- tions as Arbitration (as in the settlement of the Alabama claims), the earliest possible cessa- tion of hostilities (as after Majuba Hill), the outbreak of the South African War, the granting of the Transvaal Constitution, and the recognition of General Botha, their right place was in the Liberal ranks. And upon Domestic subjects, such as Tem- perance, the Housing of the Working Classes, the strict administration of the Public Health Acts, and many of the minor topics of social legislation, it would seem that, so far as religious considerations go, i.e. so far as membership of the National branch of the Church of Christ counts in politics at all, it should count on the side of reform of abuses rather than on the recognition and protection of vested interests. Upon the great and wide subject of financial policy is there any question that, as regards the great masses of the population, the Liberal POLITICAL LIBERALISM 187 principles upon which during the last half century our financial policy has been based, have resulted in a vast increase of comfort, especially among the poorer classes ? The pur- chasing power of their wages has been greatly increased ; their standard of living has risen ; there is less pauperism and more thrift. Is there any question that, by the application to finance of those Liberal principles, we have minimised the chances of political corruption and selfish interaction of separate interests, commonly called " log-rolling " ? At any rate, is there anything in attachment to the Church of England which should make a member of the National Church, as such, hesitate to ally himself with the party which resolutely adheres to Liberalism in such matters ? And even upon the vexed question of Education, which at the present time occupies so large a space in the public mind, there is already ample evidence that a considerable number of strong and earnest churchmen are 188 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM agreed that the safety and permanence of any settlement, and the interests of both education and religion depend, not upon the maintenance as far as possible of the status quo, nor upon the recognition of claims based even upon recent history, but upon the steady and equitable application of those principles which constitute Liberalism, and upon which all progress, edu- cational and otherwise, have been based. If the principles of the Sermon on the Mount are to guide our political, our commercial, and our public life ; if our institutions are for the realisation of principles ; if the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath ; why need any member of the Church of Eng- land hesitate to ally himself with the Liberal party ? Are not the principles of one the principles also of the other ? These are the words of the Right Hon. H. H. Asquith, K.C., M.P., about the State 1 : "The proposals of Liberalism are fruits; the 1 Liberalism : its Principles and Proposals, by H. L. Samuel, with introduction by Right Hon. H. H. Asquith, K.C., M.P. POLITICAL LIBERALISM 189 principles of Liberalism are branches, which are supported and nourished by a single stem. The ideas expressed on the platform, and the bills introduced into Parliament, are not an opportunist collection of unconnected schemes, each advocated because it happens to be popu- lar with some section of electors. They all originate in one motive, and spring from one essential doctrine. If we try to express that doctrine in a single sentence, we shall best formulate it perhaps in these words : That it is the duty of the State to secure to all its members, and all others whom it can influence, the fullest possible opportunity to lead the best life" And these are the words of Bishop Westcott about the Church : " We have in England that which gives completeness to our national life, a National Church as the spiritual organ of the nation, a Church which has shaped popular aspirations and welcomed popular influences ; a Church which has again and again proved its power to assimilate new truths, and to awaken dormant 190 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM forces ; a Church which in great crises has been able to reconcile order with progress ; a Church which has used, and with quickened devotion is striving to use, great possessions and great place, so as to bind all classes together more closely in the unity of one life, and to offer in all its freedom and grace a Gospel to the poor." " . . . . The Church is called to inspire all its members with devotion to public service, and to bring them personally once again under the invigorating influence of a disciplined life." " . . . . The National Church should recognise the duty of facing the problems of English society and English private life, with all their consequences." 1 Surely the members of a Church thus described by one of the most eminent of her recent bishops should be able to find in Liberalism the expression of their political faith, and to feel themselves in accord with the other members of the Liberal party. 1 Christian Aspects of Life, by the late Bishop of Durham, 1897. SOCIAL LIBERALISM OR LIBERAL THEOLOGY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY BY The Rev. A. J. CARLYLE We have in theology passed beyond the stage in which men thought that there was nothing to do but to clear away some lumber and the truth would stand out. We have all come to learn that construction is even more necessary than the mere removal of the superfluous ; for the living spirit not only casts off the worn- out vesture of past time, but must clothe itself anew in the forms appropriate to its own growth and to its new surroundings. It is time that religious men should under- stand that this holds in respect of the organised 191 192 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM life of society just as much as of the forms of religious belief and action. It would be a sorry spectacle if we were to see men who have done something to vindicate liberty in religion, and have begun to face the urgent need of positive construction, refuse to face the fact that the forms of human life and of the organisation of society must change, and that the new desires and ideals of men must find for themselves new modes of expression in social organisation. There is nothing clear and plain to the serious student of history if it is not this, that the social movement of our time rests upon a new apprehension of the real quality and char- acter of human nature, which is at least as important and as significant as are the new developments in the intellectual world. The critics of the modern social movements who denounce these as the expression of a mere materialism are surely the most inept, the most incapable of observers and thinkers. It argues but a small intelligence if men cannot penetrate behind the material demands of modern Social- SOCIAL LIBERALISM 193 ism to the moral and spiritual apprehensions which lie behind them, if they cannot see that these demands are in large measure the results of a new sense of the equal value and dignity of human life, of the need of making real the brotherhood of humanity, of the need of the extension of the sovereignty of justice from the political to the social and industrial sphere, and if they cannot understand that the demand for the " common control " is the form, on the one hand, of the experience which has taught Western civilisation the need of self-govern- ment, and, on the other, of the principle that in true life every man must take his share in the determination of his own fate, and can- not submit to a government which comes from outside, however well meant, however sym- pathetic, however intelligent. Freedom, justice, brotherhood, equality, these are the master principles of the revolt of the Proletariat, and surely they are also the principles, the first and rudimentary principles, of the doctrine of Christ. 13 194 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Liberalism in religion and in society has meant, in the first place, the revolt against worn- out forms and methods of life, against the superstitions which would serve to smother life in the forms which it has itself produced, but which, just because they are forms of the living spirit and not of mere dead matter, must be perpetually renewed and constantly modi- fied ; and, still more profoundly, it represents the eternal revolt of the Divine spirit in man against an authority which is imposed from out- side, which has ceased to represent the living self-determination of the free children of God. Revolt against a worn-out and merely external authority has been, and necessarily has been, the first stage in the reform of religion and of life. But revolt is not life ; revolt is only the expression of a living power breaking the bonds which are smothering it. Life itself is not negative, but positive ; life is not anarchy, but order ; or rather, to put the matter more justly, revolt against order is not liberty. Liberty is true order, obedience to the true law, SOCIAL LIBERALISM 195 the true authority, the true law and authority which come from within, not merely from without. The Liberal has understood this in politics, and destroyed the old authorities only to sub- stitute for them self-government, the " common control," in place of government by external authority ; but he has to learn a greater faith in his own principles, to understand that the " common control " which he has successfully applied to the political organisation has now to be extended to the industrial organisation. And surely the religion of the freedom of the sons of God will not fail to understand that the Christian man is freed, not that he may live in brutish and immoral isolation, but that he may find his true liberty in the free self- determination of the whole body of his equal brothers ; the Christian man who understands the meaning of the indissoluble unity of the members in the one body of Christ will also, must also, come to understand the unity of human life in the one body of the 196 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Divine Society of the state ; must understand that the freedom of man means, not the anarchical independence of the individual, but the full development of the individual, under the term of the self-determining co-operation of all the individuals in the society, which exists for all, and whose function it is to preserve and achieve the fullest development of each. Political freedom was the first aspiration of men under the terms of the new apprehensions of human nature ; the revolution which has established constitutional or democratic govern- ment in the civilised world was not founded merely on the incapacity or injustice of the old governing classes, but at least as much upon the fact that first the middle classes, and then the great slave class which survives in the modern world as the proletariat, have become conscious of the fact that they are men and not children, men and not mere slaves ; and that for good or evil, whether in the indi- vidual life, or in the life of society, men SOCIAL LIBERALISM 197 must determine their own fates ; the appear- ance of the Labour party in England and in the other civilised countries is only the most recent phase in the development of the claim that men shall govern themselves. Men demand freedom in society, not merely because without it there is no security for good government, but because without freedom, without self-determination, a man is not a man ; the demand for political freedom rests upon the gradual apprehension of a principle which is true in religion and in philosophy. But the demand for political and social free- dom after all rests upon a great assumption, the assumption of equality. As long as it was possible for great thinkers like Aristotle to argue that men were naturally and funda- mentally unequal, it was impossible to assert that men deserved freedom. The Aristotelian defence of slavery rested upon the argument that only some men possessed reason in such a sense as to be capable of self-government, self- determination, while the rest possessed only 198 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM enough reason to be able to follow it in others. The Aristotelian theory, although contradicted by some contemporary thinkers, rested upon the observation of the actual contrast between the Hellenic and the Oriental nations, and was not wholly unreasonable. Aristotle thought he saw, did actually see, that the Oriental in his intellectual and in his political life was servile, unfree. But Aristotle was none the less completely wrong, and we can recognise the source of his mistake without any difficulty. He looked only at the actual, the existing temper of the barbarian ; he did not take account of his potential capacities. He took the existing fact for an eternal fact. And within two centuries his theory was blown to the winds by the experience of the Hellenic world. These naturally unreasonable Orientals, these barbaric Westerns proved themselves to be capable of learning what the Greek had to teach, and one barbaric race proved to be the superior of the Greek in the great art of SOCIAL LIBERALISM 199 government. The Aristotelian doctrine of the fundamental inequality of human nature was reduced to an absurdity by the experience of the Macedonian and Roman Empires ; and the later philosophic systems of the ancient world accordingly repudiated it with an em- phasis which the most modern revolutionary has not surpassed ; and the great phrases of Cicero and Seneca are re-echoed in the Roman jurisprudence. The intense nationalism of the Jews, which also had expressed itself in the parallel doctrine of the indifference of God to all outside of the privileged nation, had been in some measure corrected by the insight of the great prophets who had seen, with more or less clearness, that all human nature was related to God. When Jesus Christ therefore and His Apostles proclaimed the doctrine that all men are equally capable of the Divine life, of union with God in Christ, they were ratifying the experience of the world. And when Robert Burns threw the whole humane doctrine of the Revolution into " A 200 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM man's a man for a' that," he was re-stating for Christian men their own truth, their own doctrine, the foundation of their conception of life, the doctrine of the equal dignity, the equal moral capacity, the equal value of human nature. This doctrine of equality is the fundamental Christian doctrine of human nature, and it is also the first spring of the revolt of the pro- letariat. Freedom is a great word, but the claim of freedom rests upon equality, and freedom is the method of realisation of equality. A freedom which merely reduces human life to a blind struggle between forces has no rela- tion to equality, and is, in fact, the denial of it. Equality demands the substitution of the " common control " of the self-governing com- munity for the licensed domination of force. Christianity, therefore, unites with Socialism in demanding such an organisation of society as will provide the equal children of God with the opportunity of making real their fundamentally equal capacity for the highest SOCIAL LIBERALISM 201 forms of human life. Christianity denounces with Socialism the conditions of life which impoverish, which brutalise human nature. Christianity denounces with Socialism that organisation of industrial society which makes the vast majority of mankind little better than the instruments of profit for the small minority who hold in their hands the means of production. There are some persons so ignorant of history, so unconscious of the nature of the civilisation in which they live, as to say that this doctrine of equality may be very pleasant in sound, but that it is in contradiction to the hard facts of every-day life, which take no account of it. These good people forget the elementary facts of the society in which they live, are ignorant of the first and elementary principles of the constitutional organisation of our own great country, do not understand that the constitu- tional machinery of the English state has been built up upon this very principle of the equal right of all citizens before the law, and of the equal capacity of all citizens to take their share 202 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM in the " common control." It is just because we recognise that equal capacity gives all men an equal right to a share in political authority that we have slowly built up, through the labour of a thousand years, the political liberties of the English people. These persons say that equality is a Utopian dream ! It is really the foundation of the elementary political organisation of the civilised world ; and those races or nations, like the Russian, which refuse to recognise this, do so only because they are still more than half barbaric and savage. If the people of our country are equal to the burden of their own great national destiny, is there really any person who will seriously contend that they are not equal to take their share in the common control of the industrial machinery of society ? But, again, the Christian Church proclaims brotherhood as the first principle of the cohesion and co-operation of men in society ; brother- hood, co-operation, and not competition ; and SOCIAL LIBERALISM 208 what Christ said, nineteen hundred years ago, the French Revolution has placarded on the streets and public buildings of France ; and the modern socialist proclaims it, with a new emphasis and a new significance, for he urges that it is exactly the competitive character of industrial society which is the main cause of the miseries and inequalities of the material conditions of human life. The Christian must agree with the socialist in condemning an organisation of society which runs counter to the great principle of the Christian life, the principle that men are bound together in the one body of Christ, and are bound to strive as much for the good of their fellows as for their own. That is, the doctrine of Christ compels us to condemn an organisation of society in which men are compelled to be enemies of each other, in which man is set against man, and class against class. Here, again, our friends who claim to be the representatives of common-sense interpose with the argument, that while it may be lamented 204 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM that human life is governed by competition rather than by brotherliness, this is an in- exorable necessity of human circumstance, that brotherhood or co-operation is a merely Utopian conception, and has no relation to the actual world. But surely this is to ignore the actual facts of the development of civilised society, to ignore the elementary principles which govern the structure and which have determined the progress of the political organ- isations of the West. The serious student of the history of institutions is always aware of the fact that, behind the infinite complexity of the progress of the constitutional machinery, there lies the perpetual effort of men to find such a reasonable order as will secure the due and harmonious co-operation of the various elements which constitute a political or national society, which will secure that the individual forces may not run riot in a blind and endless struggle against each other, but may be so co-ordinated as to serve to the well-being and progress of the whole society. The primitive SOCIAL LIBERALISM 205 group, whether the horde or the family or the clan, was held together by the operation of instinctive and hardly reasoned impulses of affection or tradition. The original group, whatever it was, represented a unity of co- operating individuals. Gradually this uncon- scious or instinctive co-operation passed away, but the larger aggregations of the political societies of history are not based upon the destruction of the principles of co-operation ; they also are co-operative associations, but their co-operative character has to be main- tained and developed by means of a deliberate and determined effort to find the methods and forms under which this may be secured. The history of the organisation of the modern Western nations can only be rightly appre- hended as a gradual development of the methods of co-operation. All these principles of liberty, of equality, of co-operation are summed up in the great, the supreme principle of organised society, the principle of Justice. If Christian men are 306 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM asked to join the socialist in his denunciation of the modern industrial system, it is, above all, because the industrial system is organised upon the principle of force and not of justice, because it flaunts and sets at nought the first principle of political morality, as well as the first prin- ciple of the Christian conception of the relation of man to man. The conditions which determine the remun- eration of the wage-earner are conditions governed by force, not by justice. It is economic weakness which compels the wage- earning class to accept individually so small a share in the total product of industry ; while it is his economic power which enables the owner of capital, often with hardly any labour on his own part, to take so large a share. If it is true even of the artisan that his share is so small because of his economic weakness, this is still more evidently true of that great class whose wages are only just above the minimum necessary for the maintenance of life, and of that large class which cannot, as a matter of SOCIAL LIBERALISM 207 fact, earn, through the labour of the proper wage-earner of the family, enough to maintain the family. This class is compelled to eke out its miserably insufficient wage by driving out into the labour market, first its women, the wives and mothers of the labourer, and then its children, not only when they prematurely leave school, only half-developed, not yet physically capable of labour, and therefore to grow up again into a new generation of under- paid labour, but even its little children before they have left school, stealing from them, owing to their miserable necessities, the few hours of play and even the necessary hours of sleep. It is force and not justice, blind, monstrous, inhuman force which governs industrial society. It is as though the industrial classes were the prey of some blind giant who holds in his clutches the lives, the honour, the souls of men and women and children. And we must change this. We must find some means by which we may subject these economic 208 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM forces to the principles of justice, some means by which we may substitute a reasoned and moral order for the blind collision of unmoral forces. The history of civilised society is the history of the continuous effort to compel the strong to respect the needs, the rights of the weak, to substitute justice for force as the de- termining principle of the political order ; and what we have striven to do, and in some measure have succeeded in doing in the poli- tical order, we must carry out in the industrial. I would end as I began, the Liberal movement in religion and theology must pass from the merely critical and destructive phase to the effort after construction, to the apprehension of the positive truths of God in Christ redeem- ing the world, on which the religious life of men is to be nourished ; it was necessary to throw aside what seemed to be superstition, to vindi- cate the liberty of the religious temper ; but it is upon positive faith that men live, and the Christian faith is the faith of the union of man SOCIAL LIBERALISM 209 with the life of God through Jesus Christ His Son. And so also in the political and social or economic sphere, it is not enough to vindicate the principle of liberty, or rather it is necessary that we should understand that liberty is found not in anarchy but in the just order. For the true development of the individual is not found in the isolation of the separate life ; but only under the terms of some real unity between the individual life and the universal ; man does not become human as he separates himself from God, or from his fellows, but only as he enters into communion with the life of God and with the lives of his brother men. PAST LIBERALISM BY THE MASTER OF THE TEMPLE It will be some time yet before any attempt can be made to write the history of the Liberal movement which took place within the Church of England during the nineteenth century. That movement has already passed through more than one phase of development, and it may be that further transformation lies before it. Who shall venture just now to forecast its future ? Even in its relation to the past we cannot yet see it in its true perspective. Its history, when written, will have to exhibit its connection not merely with contemporary English politics, but with the corresponding intellectual and religious movements in other European countries. In this briefest of sketches 210 PAST LIBERALISM 211 no attempt can be made to trace such influences, or even to summarise results, except provision- ally. It must be content merely to state a few facts about a few personalities, now per- haps not so well known as they used to be, such as may be found in the biographies of the time or can be supplied by the memory of living people. No inconsiderable share in the movement has been taken by lay members of the Church, but the work done by the clergy themselves has been still more important, and this alone can be treated in the allotted space. i Before me, as I write, lies a printed copy of a sermon on Toleration, preached by Sydney Smith at the Temple Church in 1807, just before the anonymous publication of the Peter Plymley Letters. This date may serve for a starting-point. Sydney Smith cannot, indeed, take rank as one of the great leaders of modern Liberal Churchmanship. His theology re- 212 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM fleeted the school of Paley, while his ecclesi- astical views are indicated by the epigram that he regarded the Established Church as a branch of the Civil Service. But he belonged to a generation which was beginning to face the question whether men ought to be put under disabilities because they did not belong to the Anglican Church, and on that question he did good pioneer work. The Plymley Letters were issued twenty-two years before Dr Arnold and Bishop Stanley published their pamphlets on Roman Catholic Emancipation. It is this priority which gives Sydney Smith his importance. We sometimes forget now what the position of Roman Catholics and other Nonconformists was before Emancipa- tion. In the land of their birth they were virtually to a great extent aliens. Political and municipal office, sometimes even pro- fessional careers, were closed to them. An annual Indemnity Act alone secured to them the elementary rights of citizenship. Re- strictions hampered their marriages and their PAST LIBERALISM 21S funerals. They could not send their sons to the Universities. Their loyalty — very possibly with justice — was suspected by the Govern- ment, while their beliefs were disliked and despised by a compact mass of public opinion around them. We all know what has hap- pened since 1807. Let us remember the debt of gratitude due to that small minority of the English clergy which for many years, under much discouragement, fought the battle of religious freedom against Church privilege. Generations are somewhat vague measures of time, but as we look back over the past century we may roughly distinguish three gen- erations of Liberal leaders among the clergy of the Anglican Church. (1) What may be called Arnold's generation ranges from Sydney Smith, born in 1771, to Arnold himself, born in 1795, and Baden Powell, born in 1796. Its work was mainly done before 1842 — when Arnold died. (2) The generation of F. D. Maurice and Arthur Stanley succeeded, and carried on its work into the seventies or 214 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM later. The birth dates of H. B. Wilson, Maurice, Pattison, Stanley, Colenso, Robert- son, Jowett, Rowland Williams, Charles Kingsley and Temple, all fall within eighteen years (1803-1821). A later group within this generation includes, among others, Farrar and Hatch, and at least one surviving veteran. (3) The work of the last thirty years has been chiefly done by men who are still living, and cannot be treated here. Arnold is unmistakably the central figure of his generation, but with him may be named two other fellows of Oriel, — Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, and Hamp- den, afterwards Bishop of Hereford. Nothing marks more clearly the intellectual pre- eminence of the Oriel common-room in those days than the fact that out of it, within a few years, proceeded the guiding spirits of two great parties in the Anglican Church. Unlike Newman and his colleagues, Arnold had little influence at Oxford and organised no systematic movement. A small group of PAST LIBERALISM 215 Liberal clergy at Cambridge, described by Dean Stanley as " equal rather than like," included Thirlwall, afterwards Bishop of St David's, Whewell, and Sedgwick. Arch- deacon Julius Hare was on terms of friend- ship with Arnold, and another Cambridge friend was Dean Stanley's father, who, when appointed Bishop of Norwich, nominated Arnold to preach his consecration sermon. Requested by the Primate to find another preacher, the Bishop refused, and the sermon was preached by one of the Archbishop's chaplains. Arnold's unpopularity among the clergy was then (1837) at its height. Shortly before his death, when he returned to Oxford as professor of history, animosities had softened, and he was received with more cordiality. Had he survived Newman's secession, his influence might have become greater, though never commanding. What would have been his attitude, if he had lived longer, towards the Biblical Criticism which was beginning to assert itself in Germany ? His letters 216 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM contain a hostile reference to Strauss, whose Lebe?i Jesu was published in 1835. On the other hand, in following Niebuhr he had accepted in germ the principles of modern criticism. His position at Rugby did not actually hamper his freedom of thought, but some collision was inevitable. A vehement article on the Hampden controversy, which Stanley, then an undergraduate, deplored, nearly brought about the censure of his Governing Body and his consequent resigna- tion. This would have been a pity, from a party point of view, for though his work absorbed energies which might otherwise have been spent on ecclesiastical and theological questions, Rugby was a Liberalising element in the country. Arnold's strong personality, coupled with the deep spiritual sensitiveness which his diary discloses, created among his pupils a special type of character, broad-minded and religious. " One of Arnold's men " was a common phrase at the Universities in those days. The fact that Stanley and others be- PAST LIBERALISM 217 came his spiritual heirs did much to lessen to the Liberal party in the Church the loss suffered by Arnold's premature death. The generation which followed had more than one leader. In the forefront of a re- markable group of Liberal churchmen, stands F. D. Maurice, who was only ten years younger than Arnold. We all remember Kingsley's description of Maurice as " the most beautiful human soul" that he had ever met. That moral and spiritual beauty, coupled with a rest- less energy and great intellectual subtlety, exerted a deep influence on his generation. Maurice was in no sense a party-leader. His son tells us that he thought parties in the Church — sectarianism of any kind — an evil so grave that nothing could excuse the organisa- tion of a new party. He occupied therefore, and was content to occupy, an isolated position. For all his genuine humble-mindedness he was singularly independent in forming his opinions. If it is true, as Stanley said after his death, that every wave of thought which passed over 218 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Europe left its mark on Maurice's mind and spirit, it is also true that he was little in- fluenced by other men. As he was no party- leader, so he was no party-follower. He was no respecter of persons. He could not always see eye to eye with men whose opinions were often confounded with his own by the outside world. The breadth of " Broad Churchmen " (a term which he disliked) often seemed to him to be narrowness. He criticised Arnold freely. Even with Julius Hare, his loved brother-in-law, he felt that he was not in com- plete accord about the position of the English Church. His personal regard and admiration for Stanley were great, but their views on many points were wide apart. With Kingsley he was in closer though not complete touch ; but he had to part company with Sterling, and he felt bound, at the cost of great distress of mind, to express disapproval of his old friend Colenso. With the academic type of Liberal- ism he had little in common. From Jowett he said that he differed almost as widely as PAST LIBERALISM 219 from Mansel. Yet, in spite of all this diver- gence from friends and natural allies, he stood by each in turn at times of unpopularity and persecution. Not so much because he had himself suffered, but for the sake of religious freedom he championed causes which he could not always approve. He protested against the claim of the Bishop of Cape Town to exercise spiritual jurisdiction over Colenso ; he had a controversy with Pusey about the persecution of Jowett ; he was full of indigna- tion at the attacks on Robertson after the publication of his Life and Letters. It was not, perhaps, always easy for Maurice's friends to understand his position. He felt himself that he was liable to be " disclaimed as a muddy mystic." But the spirit which animated his life has borne much fruit since his death. He represents that interesting and important type of Liberal Churchmanship which clings with loyalty to disputed doctrines and sees new depths of meaning in the old formularies. Few people could have personally known 220 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Pattison and Jowett in their later years with- out feeling in how real a sense their theological opinions were part of them. As one listened to their talk that thought was constantly present in the background. The religious his- tory of their lives had been very different. Jowett's point of view had altered but little. Pattison 's theology had gradually shaped itself out of a widening philosophical outlook. He has himself traced the process in his outspoken Memoirs. For some ten years he had been under Newman's influence ; and when that influence ceased, in 1845, there was a strong reaction from the effect of what he afterwards called " the clerical virus." We trace the trend of his mind through the years which followed in his mention of a course of lectures attended by him at Heidelberg, the aim of which was to unite the utmost liberty of philosophical thought with Christian dogma. " Slowly and in many years " he passed " to that highest development, where all religions appear in their historical light." One result of the PAST LIBERALISM 221 storm that raged over Essays and Reviews (to which his own contribution was a solid piece of historical investigation) was that he deliber- ately gave up writing on theology and church history. We have thus lost a series of studies on the movement of theological sentiment in modern Europe, such as he alone could have produced. The sermons which, on rare occa- sions, he preached before the University, in- teresting as they were, did not compensate for this. General literature, however, gained what theology lost. Pattison's special con- tribution to Anglican Liberalism was the ideal of learning which he held before the Church. He had not the gifts needed for building up an ecclesiastical policy or for the practical adjustment of conflicting beliefs. His attitude towards life was critical rather than con- structive. His influence was not so much widely diffused as intense in its effect on a certain type of temperament. The pessimism and cynicism which he never concealed, though stimulating to some minds, were 222 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM certainly distasteful to others. But his brilliant intellect and a magnetic power in his manner impressed everyone, and in his insistence on the importance of a scientific theology to the Church of England he did work that was needed. The contrast between Jowett and Pattison was strongly marked. Jowett's influence was wider, his religious teaching was more direct and human, and the genial cynicism which in his later years sometimes gave savour to his talk was tempered not merely by his optimism but by his real natural piety. He never, like Pattison, viewed the Church of England with a dispassionate air, as though from outside. One of his biographers even describes him as seeing in the Church, could she but know the things belonging to her peace, the best hope for the future of Christianity. No doubt Jowett's interpretation of Church reform, and his conception of the meaning of Christianity, would have been rejected by the majority of his clerical contemporaries ; but his views — PAST LIBERALISM 228 difficult as it might be to put them into de- finite and systematic shape — appealed to suc- cessive generations of young men at Balliol and elsewhere, with results which are still traceable in the Church. This was largely due to the force of his personality. He was like no other man in his silences and pithy sayings. His influence was naturally aug- mented by the ignoble persecution carried on for many years, which few people now would probably attempt to excuse. The " heretical " essays on The Atonement and The Interpre- tation of Scripture raised questions on which there has since been a decided advance of thought among churchmen of unquestioned orthodoxy. This fact justifies Jowett's own statement about the essays that their chief interest was that they came a little before their time. None the less the iron entered into his soul. With all his courage and tenacity of purpose he had a sensitive nature, and the thought that words written in the cause of truth and justice had been received as heretical and 224 ANGLICAN LIBER AI -ISM mischievous doctrines caused him lasting pain. There seems much truth in the view that if the essays had been received with greater fairness and charity, "the positive side of his con- victions would have gained strength through sympathy, and he would have put forward his conclusions as the development and extension of received truth, not as a criticism upon its previous expression." The " Life of Christ," which Jowett had hoped to write, remained an unfulfilled project ; and it is from the sermons of his later life, delivered in Balliol Chapel and Westminster Abbey, that we have to gather his final message to his generation. A study of them shows more deflniteness of belief than many people are apt to attribute to him, though his religious teaching will perhaps live mainly in the form of aphorisms. Its force at present is certainly far from spent. Many thoughtful people still find it a help to recall the spirit in which he dealt with modern difficulties — a spirit which finds its expression in his prediction fifty years ago that " the criti- PAST LIBERALISM 225 cisms of the present day will at first be felt as a blow to faith, but they will issue in its fuller establishment; all that is important will sur- vive." His theological position has been called a compromise between his critical instincts and his religious feeling. But it is perhaps a truer view which regards him as taking " high rank among the Whigs of Religion — among those who, Conservatives in the true sense, have averted revolution by making timely concessions." Kingsley, as a young man, was closely asso- ciated with Maurice in his attempt to promote Christian Socialism, and retained through life the warmest admiration for his " master." When Yeast was on the point of appearing, his comment on it was : " I think this will ex- plain a good deal of Maurice." But Kingsley 's great literary gifts and his variety of interests forbid his being classed as a mere follower of Maurice. Rarely has a man been more many- sided. He was the Chartist parson of 1848, the " Parson Lot " who sympathised so passion- 15 226 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM ately with working men, the author of Alton Locke. " He was a layman in the guise or dis- guise of a clergyman," said Stanley, alluding to the keenness of his love of sport. He was a student of natural history, with a firm belief in the truth of Evolution and in the duty of the clergy to face scientific facts. He was poet, novelist, and history-professor. He was a good parish priest and a great preacher. His vehe- mence of spirit led him into exaggerations and mistakes, such as, e.g., his controversy with Newman, but he has been rightly placed among the conspicuous teachers of his age. In spite of the strength of his convictions, Kingsley, like Maurice, was not a party man. He once described himself as "an old-fashioned High Churchman." Was this description meant seriously ? It is, at any rate, at variance with the pride which he took in belonging to the Church of England as by law established. " These words he was never tired of quoting," says one who knew him well. His sermons at Westminster Abbey, at the close of his life, PAST LIBERALISM 227 attracted many people who were more or less outside the Church of England ; but neither in politics nor in theology during those later years could he be reckoned as an advanced Liberal. His religious influence was in the main a personal one, and will not perhaps survive the generation which hung upon his words, though some of his writings will certainly have a longer life. This short list of selected names must close with that of Stanley. The son of a Whig Bishop, the pupil of Arnold, owing much to Julius Hare, of whom he speaks after Arnold's death as his " living instructor," the intimate friend of Jowett from his undergraduate days and of Maurice soon afterwards, Stanley was early equipped for his life work. Before he was thirty he had published his biography of Arnold. A year or two later, in his sermons on The Apostolical Age, he had publicly declared himself in favour of applying the methods of historical criticism to the Bible. His Commentary on the Epistles to the Cor- 228 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM inthians followed, a companion work to Jowett's edition of St Paul's Epistles, though very different in treatment. By the time he was forty he was recognised, along with Maurice and Jowett, as a leader of the Liberal move- ment in the Church, — later, perhaps, as the commander-in chief. For this position Stanley had special gifts, which became more strongly marked as time went on. He knew everybody and loved to bring together at Oxford and Westminster people of different and even antagonistic views. He could not indeed persuade Liddon or Pusey or Keble to preach at the Abbey, but his social charm kept him on cordial terms with many men who detested his opinions. After the excitement of a debate in Convocation in which he had fought almost single-handed, he would entertain his antagonists at luncheon with irre- sistible courtesy. No embitterment of dispute seemed to lessen his width of sympathy. There were few Church controversies in his day in which he did not play a leading part. The PAST LIBERALISM 229 wonder was that his frail physique could stand the constant strain. The censure of Tract 90 and the degradation of W. G. Ward, the later Hampden agitation, the Gorham question, Colenso, Essays and Reviews, Ritualism, the Athanasian Creed, Inspiration, Clerical Sub- scription, the Voysey trial — such were some of the subjects to which he contributed speeches, letters, and articles. He by no means took on all these topics what is ordinarily termed the " Liberal " view. He disliked the purely nega- tive character of Colenso 's criticism ; he dis- approved of two of the essays in Essays and Reviews, to which work he had himself refused to contribute ; he had not the slightest sym- pathy with the point of view of Mr Voysey, who acted throughout in defiance of his advice. But he defended them all when they were attacked, not merely from a chivalrous sense of justice to individuals, but because he felt bound to resist every attempt to narrow unduly the comprehensiveness of the National Church. " A dogmatist in his abhorrence of dogma and 230 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM a bigot against intolerance," he detested the spirit of combination for party purposes which was at the bottom of these alternate persecu- tions by High Church or Low Church. His fearless advocacy of freedom of inquiry in Biblical study was part of the same policy of comprehensiveness. He was not afraid that in the long-run free inquiry would prove to be merely destructive. "For minds constituted on the same historical basis as his own," says his biographer, "though criticism destroyed much, it created more : if it cut away some grounds of faith it refilled the chasm with more stable foundations." His opponents could not feel this faith in the future. Pusey wrote frankly to him in 1864 : " I believe the present to be a struggle for the life or death of the English Church, and what you believe to be for life, I believe to be for death." Against this we may set Maurice's estimate of Stanley's work. " Why," asked a friend, " are things tolerated in Stanley which could not be par- doned in anyone else ? " " Because," was the PAST LIBERALISM 231 reply, " Stanley has done more to make the Bible a reality in the homes of the people than any living man." ii Sydney Smith, Arnold, Maurice, Pattison, Jowett, Kingsley, Stanley — we cannot but be struck with the diversity of the men and of the views which they represent. Had the list been extended, as it well might have been, this would have become still more evident. Though they were animated by a more or less common spirit, not one of them agreed on all points with any of the rest. They differed not merely in details of ecclesiastical policy, but still more in the relative importance which they attached to different questions. That is only another way of saying that the Liberal movement within the Church has been a highly complex one. It presents a tangled skein of theological, ecclesiastical, and social issues, the separate threads of which need to be traced and drawn out. The following is an 232 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM extremely brief summary of the lines along which thought has been moving during the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century. 1. Toleration. — The policy of concession which during this period relieved Noncon- formists of most of their disabilities was in- augurated by the Test and Corporations A ct of 1828 and by Roman Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Subsequently relief was extended to the Jews. Legislation dealt, among other points, with church-rates, with the burial question, and with the permission to sub- stitute affirmation for oath. By the abolition of tests in 1871, the Universities were opened to non-members of the Church of England. Some of us remember what alarmist predic- tions were expressed at Oxford at the time. As a matter of fact, religious influences are far stronger in the University now than they were thirty or forty years ago. 2. Christian Socialism. — Liberal Churchmen have, of course, no claim to the exclusive PAST LIBERALISM 233 possession of this idea, nor is it an essential article of their creed ; but during the Chartist Movement of 1848 and the years which followed, Maurice, Kingsley, and others made great efforts to guide the opinions of the working classes, and to promote a type of socialism on the lines of Christian brother- hood. Their work failed to achieve all that they had hoped. They succeeded, however, in getting an Act passed in 1852, which gave a legal status to co-operative bodies, and the Working Men's College at Great Ormond Street, since transplanted to Crowndale Road, N.W., has been the parent of many similar institutions. 3. Comprehensiveness. — The conception of a comprehensive National Church — so dear to Arnold and Stanley — had a twofold bearing on the ecclesiastical situation. On the one hand, as put forward by them, it involved a theory of the Established Church which almost identified it with the State, though from this view Maurice and others would 234 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM certainly have withheld their assent. On the other hand, all who desired comprehensiveness were strongly opposed to the spirit which sought to purify the Church by driving out unorthodox opinions. No useful purpose is served by recalling in detail a most unpleasing story of obloquy, prosecution, and persecu- tion. Few Liberal leaders escaped ; but, in spite of this, they consistently supported Tractarians and Evangelicals alike — Gorham, or W. G. Ward, or Pusey, as the case might be — whenever attempts were made by either party to drive the other into exile. 4. Clerical Subscription. — Opinions differed as to the right policy on this question. Arnold signed the petition in favour of relaxation presented by Whately to the House of Lords in 1840, but was not enthusiastic about it. Jowett, in 1841, was for trying to get the articles simplified : under the existing system a strict construction or an indefinite latitude seemed to him equally impossible. Kingsley, more than twenty years later, " could sign the PAST LIBERALISM 235 articles in their literal sense toto corde " ; he felt in himself " a capacity for drifting to sea," which made him " cling nervously to any little anchor, like subscription." Stanley's letter to the Bishop of London, in 1863, led to the Act of 1865, subsequently ratified by convocation, which substituted the present form of declara- tion, with the result that the clergy could no longer fairly be regarded as bound to particular phrases. 5. Theology and Science. — Arnold, himself a geologist, shows in his published letters little consciousness of the growing hostility between physical science and theology which marks our period. Some of the earlier crude attempts at reconciliation were examined in the article on Mosaic Cosmogony in Essays- and Reviews. But an acute stage had been reached before this with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860 brought about a dramatic encounter between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, in which the advantage 236 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM did not rest with the latter. Few theological developments are more remarkable than the change which afterwards took place in the attitude of the Church towards evolution. Kingsley did something towards this by a lecture at Sion College, in 1871, on the Theology of the Future — of special import- ance because delivered to a clerical audience. Jowett preached in 1874 a University sermon on the Relations of Science and Religion. Aubrey Moore, who belonged to a later generation and died prematurely only eighteen years ago, also did good work. But the rapprochement which seems likely to take place between the theological and the scientific point of view is in the main the work of living men. 6. Biblical Criticism. — Only the initial stages of this great movement come within our pur- view. The foundations were laid before 1880, but critical work in England had hardly begun. Both Jowett and Stanley were early suspected of " Germanism " at Oxford, and the PAST LIBERALISM 387 suspicion was deepened in Stanley's case by his sermons on the Apostolical Age, already mentioned. H. B. Wilson's Bampton Lec- ture, in 1851, perhaps made the first definite demand for freedom in theological inquiry. Then came Essays and Reviews, with the essay by Jowett on the Interpretation of Scripture and that by Rowland Williams on Bunsen's Biblical Researches. Colenso's Pentateuch, which appeared in 1862, was not welcomed by Maurice and Stanley. Jowett thought its " tone a good deal mistaken," but felt that " all good persons should agree in heartily sym- pathising with the effort to state the facts of Scripture exactly as they are." With Mr Voysey, a few years later, Jowett could not feel the same sympathy. Both he and Stanley recommended resignation, but on Mr Voysey 's refusal they still gave him their support. The session of the Committee of Revisers (1870-1884) marks the dividing line between the earlier and the later stages of Biblical Criticism. 238 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM 7. Doctrine. — It is only possible here to indicate in the briefest and baldest way one or two lines of thought along which some develop- ment of doctrine is traceable. One such was as to the nature of Inspiration. The prevailing of the wider view was attributed by Jowett to Colenso, of whom he wrote, in 1882 : " He has made an epoch in criticism by his straight- forwardness : no one now talks of verbal in- spiration." Another was concerned with the meaning of the Atonement — a discussion with which Jowett 's own name is closely connected. Another questioned the literal interpretation of the phrase " everlasting punishment," and with this inquiry we associate the names of Maurice and Farrar. As far back as 1838, Arnold wrote to an old pupil : " I do not be- lieve the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed under any qualification given of them." There is evidence of a widespread movement of thought on these and perhaps on other points during the period which ends with 1880. The result was a gradual and fairly general PAST LIBERALISM 239 acceptance of interpretations which set men's consciences free from the moral difficulties that had burdened them. Past Liberalism in these ways undeniably influenced the de- velopment of doctrine within the Church. It is impossible to sum up with any com- pleteness the work done by these past generations of Liberal Churchmen. The movement goes on without a break, and can- not be divided into sections by arbitrary dates. To try to measure the results achieved thirty years ago is to try to stand still just when the pace was accelerating. But some lessons of the past are obvious, however little they are laid to heart — few perhaps more so than the danger and mistake of religious panics. It was a critical time in the history of the Church when, within a few years, Darwin's Origin of Species-, Colenso's Pentateuch, and Essays and Reviews were all violently denounced as de- structive of Christianity. The quiet courage with which Jowett and Stanley continued to point out that truth had nothing to fear from 240 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM free inquiry saved the situation. Before Jowett's death the tide had begun to turn. The Broad Churchmen of those early fighting days were, as a rule, of a robust type, which was not always beyond criticism. They were some- times too frankly Erastian to suit modern views. They sometimes let crotchets interfere with united action. Under the stress of controversy they sometimes took too little trouble to ap- preciate their opponent's case. But many of them had qualities which their successors would do well to carry on — reverence in hand- ling the Bible, carefulness not to go beyond what the evidence warranted, readiness to face attack, a firm trust in the permanent basis of religion, and great spirituality of life. Nor was it the least among their good services that, by occupying an intermediate space be- tween the two extreme parties, they prevented England from becoming, like Belgium, a battle ground on which men have no alterna- tive but to join the ranks of either the Noirs or the Rouges. NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM BY The Rev. Professor CALDECOTT How far are our brethren of the Evangelical Churches which we in England call Noncon- formist and they are preferring to call Free Churches animated by the Liberal spirit in theology and in organisation which this volume represents ? For they, too, know the differ- ence between Conservatism and Liberalism in religion ; they have amongst them those who are tenacious of the past, timid as to the future, and those who are somewhat loosening from the past and eager to try vistas as yet unmarked. The greater communities, with which alone space permits me to deal, are the Methodists, the Congregationalists, the Baptists. I should like to include the Presbyterians, but the un- mistakeable connection of Presbyterians with '2A1 16 242 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the churches in Scotland gives their history a somewhat different centre of reference from that of the purely English churches ; and within the narrow compass of these pages I think that concentration on the problem as it stands in England is my best course. Nor am I able to take the wider range which would be open if the situation in the Colonies and in America could be included : this would be necessary for a complete survey of the situation ; but the problem must be limited, and I set it simply as it stands between us of the Church of England and the English Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists. Perhaps a brief study of the situation in England will yield suggestions for wider inquiries. In order to trace recent history, limitation of the number of issues to be considered is imperative, and I have selected the following five : — Holy Scripture, Future Punishment, the relation of Christians to the World, the relation of Christianity to other Religions, and Church Polity. NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 243 I. HOLY SCRIPTURE 1. The attitude to Holy Scripture is of paramount importance to churches which are accustomed to regard it as the only source of Divine knowledge, and therefore as the sole seat of authority in religion. We must ask how they regard it both as to the nature of its authority and as to its structure. Fifty years ago this momentous prerogative was assigned to the Bible as a book ; it was regarded as not only containing the Word of God, but as itself being that Word. It was in 1852 that one of the leading intellects of Congrega- tionalism, Henry Rogers, wrote the Eclipse of Faith, in which he expressly contended that a Book-revelation is quite possible, is very use- ful, and is in analogy with God's dealing with man in other ways. This is the defence which Hutton of the Spectator called "the Hard Church " : it was also the method of Archdeacon Lee in the Bampton Lecture of 1854. In a mood far removed from Hard Churchism in 244 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM most other ways, the reliance on the book alone, in its totality and in its uncriticised structure, animated the conservatism of the great preacher Charles Spurgeon. He could form no other conception of an authoritative Word of God ; to quit this was to go " down-grade " towards scepticism. As for criticism, he avers, " We will have a whole Bible or no Bible " ; and he has no glimpse of the possibility of a revision of its structure which would be other than destructive. In colleges and in pulpits the Bible was then usually taken not only as infal- lible authority for doctrine of God, but also as consisting of communications to its writers of knowledge of events past, contemporary, and future ; in important places, at least, the communication extended to words, audible and articulate. And so clear-cut was it as a miracle, that reasons were offered as to why inspiration had ceased with its writers and the enunciation of the Divine message had totally closed. One of the earliest signs of change in high quarters appears in the First Principles of NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 245 Baldwin Brown, published in 1881 : he saw that change was impending, and for himself is content to claim that the revelation of God is in the Bible. In a Symposium arranged by the Homiletic Magazine (1884) there appear further indications of emergence from the " hard " position. M'Kennal of Bowdon trans- fers the expression " Word of God " from the book to its contents ; Edward White carries this into detail : it is the constituents of the Bible, and not the Bible as a whole, on which we are to rely : and further, as regards revela- tion, history is distinguished from doctrine. Gradually it was learned by Congregationalists that the hard view was not really the view of the greater Reformers, but a method adopted some generations afterwards by men seeking for a definite external authority, in face of the external authority claimed by the advocates of the Roman theory of the Church. Turning to Congregationalist leaders to-day, we find that Dr Garvie takes the witness of Christian experience as the proof of that 246 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM authoritativeness of what the Bible contains, reducing all to this. Dr Adeney considers the inner witness of the Spirit to be the Bible's own method of proof : the external methods are " artificial," of Rabbinic kindred : the internal witness is the " scientific " as contrasted with the " orthodox " standpoint ; and his colleague at the Lancashire Independent College. Dr Robert Mackintosh, takes the same line. Dr Forsyth thinks that to base religion on the infallibility of a book is a method which is sure to lead to Rome. The manifesto of the twenty Congregationalist leaders, issued in February of this year, says that the Bible is God's book, because it " enshrines " His revelation in Christ and the Gospel. The lay Chairman of the Congregational Union in the current year, after stating the inner witness, says of the older view that it was due to a temporary necessity for strong banks for the channel of revelation, but that now the stream has " broken bounds " and "is spreading into a broad delta of mani- festation." NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 247 As to the structure of the Bible, Dr Bennett, Dr Gray, Dr Bartlet, and other principal teachers in the Congregationalist colleges, now stand almost solidly with Dr Driver for the Old Testament, and with the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge and Scotland for the New Testament. For the Baptists, Mr Henderson, Principal of Bristol College, pleads for the retention of the authority of the written word as well as the resort to the inner witness of Scripture and the general experience. But Dr Clifford ex- pressly renounces the proof from the book itself as conceived fifty years ago, and stands upon " the massed experiences of Christian men." This change he considers to be the principal reform in Christian apologetic made since the Reformation. He accepts develop- ment within the Bible, but does not specify what scholars he follows. For the Methodist churches, the Fernley lecturer of 1881 (F. J. Sharr) rejected the appeal to spiritual judgment of the contents 248 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM of the Bible as too subjective, and the resort to degrees of inspiration as dangerously going back towards the allegorism of Maim- onides. He wholly rejected Kuenen and Well- hausen's reconstructions, and predicted speedy oblivion for them, taking his stand with Ellicott and the Aids to Faith conservatism. In 1892, again, the Fernley lecturer (Mar- shall Randies), with Driver and Dale and Gore and Sanday in view, rejects their posi- tions and argues for the traditional structure of the Bible. He disallows appeal to the witness of experience : if the written book is not authoritative, he does not see how authority could come : " minus the record, how is there any message ? " He detects even in Dale a dangerous tendency to substitute ideas for history. But when we turn to the Methodist leaders of to-day we find appeals to the inner witness and to the testimony of mankind (advocated by Dr Beet in 1884) now in possession in high places. As to structure, in the London NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 249 Quarterly Review of January 1908, Dr Davi- son shows us much : he does not profess to defend the scientific accuracy of Genesis, the universality of the Deluge, or the literal history of the book of Jonah, and " cannot close his eyes" as to the composite nature of the Gospels. Further, he does not feel bound to accept "the psychology of St Paul in detail," nor to hold that " the Pauline type of teaching is the only one discernible " in the New Testament. The general view of the Bible recommended to candidates for the ministry is that which is expressed in the teaching at Oxford and Cambridge. The theologian of the Primitive Methodists, Dr Peake of Manchester, frankly accepts the reshaping of the Old Testament by Kuenen and Wellhausen, and regards the Messianic prophecies not as specific predic- tions but as the expressions of a religious patriotism which is looking forward to a righteous nation. In Wales, if we may for the moment associ- ate with English Methodists the largest Welsh 250 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Church, the Calvinistic Methodists, it was stated in 1898, by two of their leaders, the late Principal Edwards and Mr J. Owen, that the " alarm " caused by the new critical views " has somewhat subsided," and that, though " misgiving " is still felt by many, not a few have publicly accepted the new positions, and that " their number is probably increasing/' II. FUTURE PUNISHMENT In the total view of the Future Life we are not in a position to test accord as between Liberal Nonconformists and Liberal Church- men, for we do not profess to have attained a common doctrine ourselves. But there are two particular features which I think we should now expect to find in any theology which we could call Liberal, viz. ( 1 ) acknowledgment that as to the ultimate future of sinners there is room for diversity of opinion, and (2) inability to accept torment as the prominent feature of punishment. Unqualified statements of* the old doctrine NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 251 still abound ; but fifty years ago they prevailed not only among Christians of small education but among thoughtful and pious leaders. In some of the principal pulpits of the Church of England the eloquence of a Henry Melvill was employed to express the unmitigated gloom and misery of an endless Hell. In the chief Congregationalist pulpit in Yorkshire lamen- tations over the inevitable calamity of the lost were wrung from the refined and generous mind of Robert Hamilton of Leeds. But as in the Church of England so among Congregationalists emergence from these fore- bodings of gloom was arising. Dr Pye Smith, from whose mind definitions and dogmas flowed in copious streams, yet paused here, and qualified his following of Calvin by the quiet declaration that Calvin should have kept to the positive side of his doctrine, the future of the elect, and not have professed to know so much of the condition of the lost ; it was Calvin's " chief fault " to treat Reprobation and Punishment as if they were as clearly revealed 252 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM to us in the Christian dispensation as Election and Salvation are. In the reaction some Congregationalists pro- ceeded not to claim freedom but to offer definite counter-doctrines in the forms of Conditional Immortality or of Universalism. Notable was the vehement advocacy of the former as "life in Christ" only, by Edward White, accepted by Dale. Universalism was advanced chiefly in America, but it had its advocates among English Congregationalists, notably Baldwin Brown. To-day what we find is the claim to be at liberty to decline the formulation of a definite view. We find, for example, that Dr Garvie does not agree that either Conditionalism or Universalism is disclosed in Scripture ; he is for continuity as between this life and the next, and cannot see more than that. Dr Adeney thinks that in the New Testament the continuance of the impenitent is contemplated, but that it also contains hints of possible destruction, and also suggestions of Universal- NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 253 ism, especially in St Paul's writings, and that the only Punishment thought of may be cor- rective in its nature. Dr Morgan Gibbon is more definite as to Punishment : he holds that it cannot be torment and that it cannot be everlasting. In the February manifesto of the twenty Congregationalist leaders all definition on this head is avoided : the reference made is limited to the broad word, " ruin." Dr Tymms, late Principal of Rawdon Baptist College, holds that the infliction of a penal suffering which prolongs sin is inconceivable ; and that, while we cannot prove either Conditionalism or, Universalism to be the means, yet the ultimate extermination of sin is " rooted in a necessity of the Divine nature." The W esleyan Methodists still print in their Catechisms selections of the severer texts, and leave them in isolation from others of different bearing, and the inference seems to be that this method still prevails in their preaching and teaching. Dr Beet, we know, has long laboured for freedom : he does not find either 254 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Conditionalism or Universalism proved in Scripture, yet he is unable to express Future Punishment in the old way. The reception of his efforts, as appeared in the published account of the Conference in which they were debated, indicates that the Wesleyan Church is not yet prepared to follow his lead. Among Primitive Methodists, whatever be the attitude of the main body, their foremost teacher, Dr Peake, publicly announces that " he has broken "—nay, he says " we have broken — " with very much in the old-fashioned views": he pleads, like Dr Garvie, for continuity be- tween this life and the next, and thinks that the difficulties against Universalism have been exaggerated. In the Free Church Catechism composed by representatives of Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists (with others), it is the omis- sions, on this as on some other great issues, which are noteworthy. Attention is confined to the destiny of believers : the destiny of believers is a dogma, but neither penal suffer- NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 255 ing nor any means of the ultimate victory of righteousness is alluded to. The implica- tion rather lies in the direction of Conditional Immortality being the doctrine underlying the agreement to confine dogmatic expression to the future of believers ; but perhaps it is more true to the situation to consider that freedom of belief as to the future of the im- penitent is the intention of the Catechism. III. THE CHURCHES AND THE WORLD It will not be gainsaid that the Nonconformist churches of fifty years ago shared with the Evangelicals in the Church of England the view that the aim of religion was to bring men out of an opposing world. The world was regarded as under hostile powers : its business was at best a temporal necessity, its amuse- ments were anti-spiritual : a line between the secular and the religious was very sharply drawn. Even public affairs were not looked upon as very becoming for souls engaged above all things in preparation for eternity. 256 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Parliament was perhaps worthy, with the Army and Navy and Civil Service. But local government was mainly in the hands of men who had no hearts for religion, and it had fallen into the degradation which excited the satire of Thackeray and the detestation of Dickens. As Dr M'Kennal put it, " There were humane men and women, beautifully humane, among both the rich and the poor ; but of humanity in legislation and administration we never heard." For human feeling the outlet was charity, and that was a fountain which never ran dry : but it was individualistic in its con- ception, and the churches as such exhorted to its exercise, but took little organised part in it themselves. Two other essays in this volume draw attention to the change of attitude that has come over the Church of England : how does it stand with the Nonconformist Churches ? In the first place, their leading theologians now mark with emphasis the ethical and social character of the Gospel. It has profound NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 257 concern with the world : it must enter into the secular domain, ethically even if not politically, and permeate its life with Christian principles. References are scarcely necessary : the way in which Dr Fairbairn draws his philo- sophy of the Christian religion to a culmina- tion in an ethical mission is followed up by Dr Garvie in his brief but forcible presenta- tion of what is "the Gospel for to-day." The manifesto of the Twenty, when it has defined the Church, immediately adds that to it " is committed the task of transforming the world, morally and socially, into the Kingdom of God." A Baptist thinker, Mr Medley, late of Rawdon College, claims that "it is surely possible for a Christian man to be at home and free in every sphere of human interest, and to find all sacred." No one can think of Methodism as ever avoiding the world in the sense of leaving it un appealed to, yet it was rather as a call to men to come out of the evil that its leaders conceived their message. Now, 17 258 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Hugh Price Hughes' impetus is everywhere : his successor at the West London Mission, Mr Rattenbury, says that the world itself is to be conquered : "it is impossible to read the Gospels fairly without saying that the estab- lishment of a better social order was at least part of the programme of Jesus Christ." The range of the new Methodist hymn - book (1904) illustrates the change : the scope of the hymns for public worship has been enlarged from the region of inward and personal ex- perience to the expression of the Christian experience in nature, in common human affairs, and in national life. In the actual work of the Nonconformist churches signs of this change are on every hand. A great instance of its coming upon us was that work of Dale in Birmingham which his son most aptly designates " a Municipal Gospel." Everywhere we see what have been hitherto places of worship, pure and simple, with schools and a classroom or two attached, transformed into " Institutional Churches," NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 259 providing for socialities of most manifold character: recreation, amusement, literature, music, and friendly intercourse ; and they are designed not only for the welfare of the poor, but for the provision of healthy social life for the young men and women for whom modern urban life makes homes less general than they used to be, and for the working classes, who find it hard to establish homes on sufficient scale for the needs of a wider outlook on life than contented their fathers. The Free Church Catechism sets before the adherents of those churches no less an aim than " to imbue the nation with the spirit of Christ." Whether we take this as signifying the individuals of the nation, or the nation in its public life, imperial or local, we may fairly say that in the Church of England, as liberal Churchmen understand it, and in these Churches, there is now a unanimity of general intention which amounts to identity. 260 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM IV. CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS The old concentration on the Bible closed many eyes to the true features of the other religions of the world. In sadness Christian people thought of them all as false, deceptive, corrupting : as either idolatrous or rationalistic, and wholly opposed to the Christian faith. A single illustration of this well-known atti- tude will suffice. The Fernley lecturer of 1884 (Benjamin Hellier), in advocating the "Uni- versal Mission of the Church of Christ " shows no evidence of ever looking into other religions with a desire to meet them. The heathen are all "in unspeakable misery and degradation." Specifically, he has persuaded himself that they know " nothing of peace of mind, — nothing of holiness " ; they " sit in darkness, perishing with hunger, full of misery, full of despair." In this uninquiring and unsympathetic spirit the appeals for missionary effort were made for many years. We see a sign anticipatory of the change in NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 261 this as in other things in Baldwin Brown. He notes as prevalent in his own churches such a view as the above : he traces it to Augustinian theology, and for himself affirms that he has come to regard it as " essentially unchristian." The Fernley lecturer of 1880, Dr Banks, had seen deeper issues : he dwelt on " the danger of underestimating the truth in heathen systems," and speaks of Christ making atone- ment even for the millions who pass away in ignorance of Him, and of this atonement having effects "in gleams of truth and goodness" amongst them. But he is cautious ; and, taking into account the rising advocacy of more gener- ous recognition, he proceeds to mark the error which exaggerates the good in them as even " more dangerous " than the depreciation. He goes forward again, however, when he re- cognises God's presence throughout history, and reaches our modern point when he states that the whole religious world is "a prepara- tion for Christianity." 262 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM For leaders of the present day a few refer- ences will be sufficient. Dr Adeney writes : " The time has gone by when we could be so foolish as to think of honouring Christianity by depreciating what we regarded as its rivals. On the contrary, we carefully pursue the choicest thought of the world, rejoicing to recognise its excellences." Mr Compton Rickett, the Chairman of the Congregational Union : " Nor can we refuse to the Sacred Scriptures of other religions clear echoes of the voice of God." Dr Clifford accepts appreciatively their sacred books and vindicates the authority of the Bible by the method of comparison. Among Methodists, Dr J. H. Moulton of Didsbury College speaks as a special student of comparative religion in earlier phases, and finds himself quite undisconcerted by the evidence of ideas of incarnation, atonement, and resur- rection " everywhere " in the world's history, because he has learned that in history the Christian revelation of God has affinities with NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 263 " the deepest and most universal instincts of men." Professor Geden, of the Wesleyan College, Richmond, after special studies in Eastern religions, writes : " It is becoming increasingly impossible, and I trust increasingly rare, for a Christian minister, still less a missionary in foreign countries, to regard himself as ade- quately equipped for his work while he remains in ignorance of the habits and thoughts of alien peoples who, with different preconceptions and from different standpoints, have stretched out their hands towards God " ; and for himself, he speaks of his impressions not only of the "haunting picturesqueness," but of the "deep religiousness " of the East. V. CHURCH POLITY In the polity of the Churches signs of move- ment towards consolidation are everywhere apparent, both within the Nonconformist Churches and between them. The old rigid independency of the local congregation began 264 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM to give way when the Congregational Union was founded by John Angell James in 1831. Since then the proportion of congregations be- longing to it has continually increased, and its meetings have been more and more influential ; it has issued a Declaration of Principles, has permanent officials, takes note of colleges, and is a centre of energy and counsel. The County Unions exercise a very important unifying function by their ability to grant or refuse " recognition " to ministers elected by the congregations ; and there is an approval im- plied in the ordination which would be with- held if a congregation were acting perversely and injudiciously in its choice of its pastor. These are potent signs of the necessity for transcending the strictness of Independency. Again, the plea made by the late Dr Stoughton that the time had come for grouping the several congregations in a town and adopting muni- cipal boundaries for the unit area, and the affiliating of village churches to the larger churches in the neighbouring towns, indicate NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 265 the widening of the range of view. Alexander Hannay toiled for years on behalf of the national Union. In 1901 Dr Joseph Parker, from the Union Chairmanship, made a vehe- ment appeal for a United Congregational Church, defined as a unity in name as well as in fact ; and this because " things were not going well " on the old lines. The proposal rather took away the breath of many of the rank and file, but it was at once endorsed by such leaders as M'Kennal and Berry, and is at work in many minds. Federation is the idea which grows in favour : but it is to be real. In the words of Mr F. H. Stead, of the Browning Settlement, " a visible and organic union, which shall give free- play to the spontaneous initiative and bound- less diversity " of congregations. Visible, be it noted ; no longer remission of unity to the Church invisible : and organic, no longer limit- ing the reciprocal influences to simple expres- sions of fraternal sentiment. A similar movement has taken place among 266 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the Baptists: they also have their County Associations, their National Union, their col- leges, their central offices and officials ; but I understand that the congregational conception of the Church is retained with great tenacity by most Baptists : visible and organic unity is of small value, even in ideal. In Methodism the principal sign is the ten- dency towards consolidation by the closing up of subdivisions. In 1907 three dissident bodies, the New Connexion (formed in 1797), the Bible Christians (1815), and the United Free Churches, itself a later combination, united, and obtained an Act of Parliament sanctioning this so far as the various trust properties were concerned. These bodies were small in numbers, but they were, as a rule, composed of members of particular zeal and force of character, and the achievement of union by them cannot be without effect on the still triple character of English Methodism. The admission of the laity to share in the government of the Church was for a time a NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 267 dividing principle, but there is now no differ- ence of opinion on this ; and it is not easy for outside observers to see why the divisions con- tinue, except for historical associations (of no long growth) and questions of church-buildings and properties : certainly the divergences appear too slight to be likely to resist for long the prevailing tendency towards consolidation. Probably the movement towards union will be still quicker in the Colonies, and this will have a reflex effect at home. The consolida- tion of the three great divisions now remain- ing would be a very important step towards Christian unity. Some may think that it would tell against union with other Churches, as Methodism would then be still stronger to resist the general force of gravitation ; but at any rate, for the present, the centripetal force at work within its own borders is a marked feature of the time. Besides these movements towards union within themselves, the forces of consolidation are at work between the great denominations. 268 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Proposals are freely discussed, and are partially set on foot, for taking a town as a unit for Free Churchmanship as a whole. To prevent overlapping and waste through competition, districts are to be assigned to this, that, or the other body according to local circum- stances, not according to doctrinal considera- tions. This amounts to a sinking of differences in the spiritual region which could only be made possible by the sense of overpowering agreement in fundamentals. Similar proposals are made for rural districts ; and for villages in which there are more chapels than one, concentration of work in various ways is being considered. In fact, we seem almost in sight of the mapping out of England into a second single system of "parishes" running side by side with the Church of England system, so far as these three great denominations are concerned. The direction of this movement has assumed form by the formation of local Free Church Councils, now numbering 918 ; and a National Free Church Council, to unite them and or- NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 269 ganise their activity. Animated to some ex- tent by a common opposition to the " estab- lishment " of religion, their unifying force lies much deeper than that : it is positive, forma- tive, constructive. And, on the whole, it was perhaps the most impressive change for English Nonconformity as the nineteenth century was preparing to make way for the twentieth ; and it is now a settled feature for their next stage of growth. These changes in organisation have naturally led to the appreciation of the need for an expressed common basis of thought and doctrine. In spite of the constitutional aversion to creeds and dogmas felt by so many Nonconformists, they agreed, in 1898, to issue a common statement in the shape of a Free Church Catechism : a momentous step, inasmuch as it is, as the compilers themselves point out, the first " combined statement of interdenominational belief" since the days of Luther and Zwingli. 270 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM OUR APPEAL What is the situation disclosed by the brief survey now given of recent movements in English Nonconformity ? As Liberal Church- men we cannot but feel that we are witnessing indisputable convergence between our thoughts and theirs. On the construction of the Bible and on the nature of its authority, on what is of faith as to the future life, on the duty of the Church to the world, on the place of Christianity among the religions of mankind, there seems to be practical identity between their leaders and ours. In Church polity we see everywhere amongst them actual move- ments towards centrality and co-ordination, even if not everywhere towards visible and organic unity. Is convergence to prevail in the region of important doctrines whilst all our activities are to continue to run in channels which may be parallel but which must on no account be united into a single course of Christian life and work ? My endeavour to NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 271 indicate the movements as they present them- selves to my own observation would be offered merely as a contribution to history if I did not proceed to some reflection as to the possibility of a further convergence such as I think Liberal Churchmen have in their minds. Let me therefore now offer an argument on the fundamental feature of the situation as between Liberal Churchmen and Nonconformists. Do the leaders of Nonconformity express any desire to include the visible and organic unity of the Christian religion in England in their theory of the Church ? There are beyond question many, represented by Dr Horton, who are quite conservative in their theory of Congregationalism. Dr Horton still appeals to the New Testament period as giving us " a rounded orb " of authority for Church polity, and he reiterates his faith that Congregational- ism was so authorised, and is so still. But others have shown a tendency towards includ- ing the visible unity of Christians in their con- ception of the very essence of the Church. Dr 272 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Stoughton taught, so long ago as 1870, that "the Church is more than a combination " ; Dr Dale's biography shows his strong mind moving stage after stage away from individualism and the self-sufficiency of the local group. Dr Adeney is so strongly for sociality that it can scarcely be possible for him to be contented with the conception of a society defined by merely local considerations. Dr Forsyth ex- tends the ground of appeal : he says that for Christian institutions, as well as for Christian ideas, " we cannot now go back to the fountain- head and simply ignore the two thousand years of Christian evolution : we cannot do that now in the matter of polity " : though I must con- fess that in another place of the same book his confidence seems to fail him when he says, " It is not in the genius of Christianity that its essence should be distilled for us out of its whole history : the key is given in its source." Still, we can perhaps reconcile these statements, and simply note that while he places the essence at the fountain-head he is determined NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 273 also to attribute vitality and value to the later courses of the stream. But Mr Sylvester Home, the head of the largest Institutional Church of the Congregationalists, is bolder : he plants himself on present efficiency as the criterion of polity : he quotes Hatch's saying that the Church in the twentieth century should be " the Church that is fittest to meet the needs of the new age," and expresses his " cordial agreement" with that theory. With him, therefore, polity is at least an open question. Now, seventy years ago, before the Con- gregational Union came into existence, the isolated Independent congregations used to vindicate their polity by appeal to the New Testament epoch of the Church alone ; and within that period the teaching of St Paul's later epistles, Ephesians and Colossians, was little considered. The ideal unity apparent in those epistles and in the Kingdom as proclaimed in the Gospels was obscured by the isolated and disconnected character of the communities founded by the Apostles in the early missionary 18 274 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM period. On this basis of reference there was a plausible case even for an extreme theory of Independency, although the strength of the case was not such as to win for it the support of more than a minority of students of Church history. But, however it might have been seventy years ago, and on the ground of appeal then adopted, we now seriously ask for the attention of the thoughtful supporters of Independency, or of such separateness as ac- quiescence in the permanence of Methodism implies, to their present situation. They have themselves changed their ground of appeal. As we have seen in the section deal- ing with their new view of the proof of the authority of Scripture itself, they now appeal to the " massed experiences " of believers in the nineteen centuries as well as to the influence of the Spirit upon the individual reader of the sacred writings. We claim that this should bring them into line with ourselves : by this appeal we all show that we regard the King- dom of Christ as one and continuous, and NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 275 the ministration of the Holy Spirit as still proceeding in a manner not in essence dif- ferent from that of His ministration in the minds of the early disciples. Surely, then, our ground of appeal should not be re- duced to the thin stream of experience of those Christians who retained Independency or local association as their principle of Church polity ? We see sometimes the history of the Christian consciousness regarded as if it sank into a marsh, a thousand years broad, with only a few stepping- stones, such as Augustine, the Albigenses, and Wyclif before the Reformation, and after- wards, in England, showed terra jirma only in the strictest Puritans and the later Evan- gelicals. But the modern sense of the con- tinuity of all human life, and the revived sense of the continued presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church all along the centuries, are shared by the leaders of the Free Churches and by Liberal Churchmen in the Church of England. May we not now unite in bringing to light the deeper continuity ? in seeing that 276 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM truth was aimed at even under the distortions of doctrine, and efficiency even under the corruptions of practice and presumptions of authority we agree in lamenting ? We are as anxious as they to shake free from obsolete modes of intellectual expression, from mediaeval and seventeenth-century forms of Church government and regulation, in so far as these belonged to epochs of thought and life which have passed away. We agree, for example, that the nature of the authority proper to Church Councils and their decrees was mis- conceived : that it never should have been in- truded into the innermost region between the source of Divine light in Jesus Christ and the soul of the disciple. We agree that even in their proper sphere, the ordering of the public life of the Christian community, Councils were too peremptory and dictatorial, and that they made woeful error in ever calling upon the secular arm for the enforcement of their decisions upon either thought or life. But we ask our friends to believe that even in the NONCONFORMIST. LIBERALISM 277 darkest ages Councils, even of Bishops, honestly aimed at beneficent objects, and sought the assistance of the Holy Spirit in sincerity : and dare we say that this was ever wholly withheld from them ? We point now to the continued and increasing practical acknowledgment on the part of Nonconformists of the necessity of councils and decrees, though they are now desig- nated "assemblies" and "resolutions." With the recent " declarations of faith," " manuals of principles," manifesto of " points requiring emphasis," and catechisms in our hands, we see evidence that corporate acts of this kind cannot be dispensed with : that they are acknowledged to be signs of growing life. If, then, we refuse to regard the corporate action of the Church during the nineteen centuries as animated by the same purpose as these recent corporate actions, does not the appeal which Nonconformists now agree with us in making to the continuity and abiding unity of Christian experience almost fall through, and the modern apologetic stand before the world on a perilously narrow base ? 278 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM We ask, then, that those who are animated by the modern historical sense and who rely upon it as the witness of truth and authority, should join with us in perceiving that this implies a greater reality for the unity of the Church than was seen fifty years ago. An ideal unity, invisible not visible, in sentiment but not in organisation, can no longer content us. To make it visible and organic, for ourselves and in view of the waiting world, cannot but be an aim for which Christian men can never cease to labour and to pray. Before the thought of men in West and East we desire to present a philosophy of the Church which sets the One in superiority to the Many ; a theology which expands the doctrine of a one and undivided Body of Christ in terms that plain men cannot mistake, because it is affirmed of the Church as they can see it and not in recondite and esoteric significances ; a method of Society which unites in a common stream and not in parallel channels the spiritual energies of Christ's disciples. For the convergences which we NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 279 see already we are deeply grateful ; that they may pass into manifest unity as this century proceeds must be our hope. It is our differ- ences that are fading into the past : into that part of the past which was occasional and transitory. We feel continuity throbbing with a force which cannot be concealed and left underneath the surface. Our eyes are bright with the vision which Thirlwall saw of "the Lord's great house, with earth for its floor and heaven for its roof." We look for a develop- ment of the Christian religion in England, as well nationally as in the inner hearts of men and women, that will at once embody what is best in a noble though chequered past, and express the new light and the freer energies of the time of hope in which we are so happy as to live. ESTABLISHMENT The problem of the continuance of the " Establishment " of the Church remains be- tween Liberal Churchmen and Liberal Non- 280 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM conformists. Not completely so, of course, because many Liberal Churchmen have re- nounced hope of seeing an Established Church continued on such lines as their Liberalism can approve. In what I have to say, therefore, I only speak as one inviting attention to reflec- tions which the general principles of Liberalism prompt in some minds at least. In the first place : Is it not true that for many Liberals what is rightly objected to is not establishment itself, but the establishment of the wrong thing ? What is wanted is the national recognition of the Church of Christ in the twentieth century ; what we have is the continuance of the Church of the Tudor and Stuart settlements of religion. What is desir- able is a connection between the Nation and the Church on broad and comprehensive lines and in a varied and elastic constitution ; what we have is, as Hort said, a dualism between Parliament and two unreformed Clerical Convocations. In the second place : We have to deal with a large mass of tangible bequests of the past ; NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 281 not to speak of the endowments, the cathedrals and parish churches are a heritage beyond price. To sever the relation between Church and State now would give one or other of two lamentable results. The endowments and the edifices might be removed from the service of religion altogether : the lands and tithes are loosely attached to it, and with the congenital indifference of material property they could be transferred to other uses — a course which nothing but absolute proof of incurable per- niciousness could justify. Or else the time- honoured places of worship disposed over all pur towns, villages, and hamlets would be handed over to a portion of the nation, and mainly to that part of it which is most unable to accept the second Reformation now in process. In this latter case, the inheritance of the past would be in the hands of those who, according to the judgment of Nonconform- ists themselves, are more remote from the simplicities and breadths of religion than the Church of England as at present situated. 282 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM And thirdly: Is it the right moment for dispensing with the legacies of the past and narrowing the use of the ancient churches, when what is conspicuous before our eyes is the manifold convergence of Christians who have hitherto walked apart ? On the impor- tant points indicated in this paper, convergence among English Christians is taking place ; and there are other similar points. Is a time of an increasing agreement, and a brightening pros- pect of consolidation in temper and spirit that is at least making towards a visible unity which will efface the separatism of the last three centuries, the moment for an irrevocable de- cision either to remove endowments from religion altogether or to confirm an unre- formed part of the Christian community in the sole use of the oldest and most venerable Houses of Prayer in the land ? I think that there is in the minds of many, except those who have adopted an unchange- able conviction that national action in religion is in its nature indefensible, a feeling that the NONCONFORMIST LIBERALISM 283 present is a time too transitional, too deeply fraught with movement in theology and in social order, to be chosen for taking a step which would terminate finally a connection between the nation and its religion as old as the national history itself. And as against the temptation to fall back on the line of least resistance — for abolition is always easier than construction, and even than maintenance — I would suggest that it is possible that for England there may be a special call to stand firm, and to lead the world in the matter of the connection between the nation and the Christian religion. We need not follow France, face to face as she is with a branch of the Church which refuses to come out of Medieval- ism. And we need not be content to learn lessons of supreme polity from our own Colonies or from America in their untried youth. In the broad Christianity of the future, national as well as individualist religion may still be pos- sible, and the demonstration of the possibility may be the high privilege of the English nation. GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM BY The Rev. WILLIAM D. MORRISON In the Protestant Church of Germany religious Liberalism may be described as a tendency or group of tendencies : a widely diffused prin- ciple rather than a highly organised ecclesi- astical party. In this respect it resembles the movement of Liberal religious opinion among ourselves. In all countries and among all sections of the Christian Church the progress and development of Liberalism have been more conspicuously the result of the ideas it has advocated than of its organisation as a party within the Church. As a party within the German Church, religious Liberalism is not to be compared with the powerful conservative forces to which it is on many points opposed ; 284 GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 285 but as a living, vigorous principle permeating the whole organism of ecclesiastical thought and life, it is probable that religious Liberalism was never more effective than it is to-day. If we examine the ecclesiastical situation in Germany, we shall find that the opponents of the Liberal attitude of mind in religious matters are continually making concessions to it on points of policy and doctrine. They do not become Liberals in name, but they assimilate much of the substance of Liberalism, and in this way perform an inestimable service in modify- ing or transforming the traditional attitude of mind. One of the most distinguished and influ- ential leaders of the conservative elements in the German Church at the present moment is Professor Reinhold Seeberg of the University of Berlin. Professor Seeberg has a wide re- putation as a writer on Christian dogma, and his work on the German Church in the nine- teenth century, as well as his recent lectures on the essential truths of Christianity, amply 286 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM justify the esteem in which he is held. One of the fundamental tenets of religious Liberal- ism in Germany is that we must make a distinction between the form and the substance of religious doctrine. It is not contended that the Church can do without doctrinal forms in the expression of its religious aspirations and experiences ; but it is maintained that the out- ward vesture of religious belief is not necessarily an essential part of its vital texture. The form is a product of the age in which it arises, and is determined by the imperfect knowledge of the time : it is an attempt to express the permanent contents of the Christian faith in terms conformable to the prevailing concep- tions of the world and man. In the introduc- tion to his work on the German Church in the nineteenth century, Dr Seeberg frankly accepts and emphasises this principle. He says that von Hofmann of Erlangen uttered the im- mortal phrase for the present ecclesiastical situation when he said that what is now needed is " a new way of teaching old truths." The GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 287 eighteenth century, owing to its want of historical insight, was unable to distinguish between the old truths and the old forms in which these truths were clothed, and on this account it rejected both. The nineteenth century has succeeded in perceiving this dis- tinction ; it has largely recovered the old truths, but it has failed to find satisfactory forms for expressing them. Professor Seeberg with the Liberals contends that the old forms are dead ; they cannot be revived. The great problem before the Church at the present time is the creation of new forms for the old faith which are adapted to the needs of modern life. On this fundamental point Dr Seeberg is at one with his colleague, Professor Harnack. In an address recently delivered at the University of Berlin on Protestantism and Catholicism, Dr Harnack, one of the most eminent leaders of German religious Liberal- ism, in speaking of the doctrinal differences between these two forms of Christianity, stated that the time had come when the Evangelic 288 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Church must openly declare that the old confessions were not a law which the Church must endure, but an inheritance from the past which may be used with freedom. It is significant and impressive to find that a trusted representative of tradition and an eminent representative of progress should be at one as to the nature of the task which is now confronting the modern Christian Church. But it is only in an atmosphere of freedom that the problem of finding new forms for the old faith can properly be solved. It is here that the point of cleavage arises between the ordinary traditionalists and the Liberals, or, as some of them prefer to call them- selves, the modernists. The traditionalists as a body, unlike Dr Seeberg, assert that the essence of Christianity consists in its dogmatic contents, and that its dogmatic contents are to be found in the ecclesiastical confessions of the past. It is contended that the only people who have a right to teach in the parishes and GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 289 at the universities are men who are prepared to give an ex animo assent to the doctrines contained in these confessions. The Church has no duties towards Christians who cannot accept them. In opposition to this view the Liberals maintain that the essence of the Christian faith does not consist in its dogmatic but in its religious and moral contents. It is not a man's theoretical opinions upon points of dogma which make him a Christian, but the religious and moral character of his life. The Christian religion is not supremely concerned with metaphysical speculations about dogma, but it is supremely concerned with the manner in which a Christian ought to live. In a pamphlet published by the oldest of the German Liberal societies (the German Pro- testant Union) it is stated that the traditional- ists are aiming at securing the supremacy of one dogmatic system in the Church, whereas the object of the Liberals is the free develop- ment of the religious life in all its varied forms. A younger society (the Union of Friends of 19 290 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM the Christian World) emphasises a similar point of view. We stand, says this society, for the absolute freedom of theological inquiry and for the right of the public expression of its results. These are the indispensable condi- tions of the development of evangelic religion among the people. We demand freedom for our students of divinity in the formation of their convictions and the protection of all who are exercising ecclesiastical functions against the application to them of a rigid interpretation of the articles of faith. It is only on these conditions that the clergy can enjoy the confi- dence of the people. A society which takes up a middle position between the Liberals and the Conservatives is equally insistent on the need of liberty (the Evangelic National Church Union). According to this society the teachers of theology must remember that they exercise their office in the sendee of the Church. But it is in the interests of the Church itself that these teachers should enjoy undisputed freedom. It is true that freedom is not of itself a solution GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 291 of the task which lies before the Church ; the importance of freedom consists in the fact that it is the only instrument which will enable a solution to be found. Fetters on the mind are as fatal to life and movement as fetters on the limbs, and the occasional aberrations arising from the spirit of liberty are far less dangerous to the Christian Church than the immobility and numbness inevitably produced by a dog- matic despotism. The doctrinal standpoint of the German Protestant Union was set forth by this society in a leaflet issued to the public in 1905. In this leaflet the society asserts that it places the religious and moral import of Christi- anity in the foreground. " It is not the accept- ance as true of certain dogmatic propositions of bygone times which makes a man a Christian. He only is a Christian who puts his trust in God revealed in Christ as the Heavenly Father : who pronounces the Lord's Prayer with an honest heart : who follows Jesus Christ in the task of moral regeneration and brotherly love. 292 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Such a man has a full right to be a member of the Evangelic Church, even if he doubts or disapproves of the dogmas of the Church. It is not dogmatic opinions, but a religious moral character which makes the Christian." The doctrinal position of the centre party in the German Church (the Evangelic National Church Union) does not differ in essentials from the attitude of the more advanced party as represented by the German Protestant Union. " The ground of our salvation," says the pro- gramme of the Evangelic National Church Union, " is the revelation of God in Christ. The historical source and standard of revelation is Holy Scripture. . . . We separate ourselves, on the one hand, from those who regard the evangelic faith as bound down to certain given forms and formulas, and who consider the con- fessions of faith as being of the same character as legal documents. With us attachment to the Evangelic Church consists in the possession of common religious ideals, and above all in an inward relation of the soul to God in Christ. GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 293 We are able to recognise fellowship in the faith, even where we differ both in form and degree with regard to Christian doctrine. On the other hand, we separate ourselves from those who, overlooking the continuous presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, regard the formulas of the past as a burdensome inheri- tance from bygone times. We look upon ourselves as substantially at one with the faith of our Church as it found expression in the formulas of the Reformation. But we no longer look upon the letter of these formulas as a satisfactory expression of the spirit by which they are inspired." At the present time it may be said of the German Church as a whole that the dominant movement within it, especially at the univer- sities, is a movement from dogma to religion. This great movement was originated by Schleiermacher more than a century ago, and all parties and shades of opinion in the German Church have been drawn into it. It is recog- nised that dogmas are the attempts of the 294 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM Church at various periods of its history to express the contents of the religious conscious- ness in the terminology of the times in which they were framed. It is felt that this terminology is more or less of a temporary character. The religious truth which it enshrines is not dependent upon it, and is capable of being expressed in other forms. The great saving truths of the Christian religion must not be sacrificed to the dogmatic forms in which many of them have come down to us. Dogma exists for the edification of the Church ; the Church does not exist for the maintenance of dogma. When dogmas cease to edify ; when they cease to appeal to heart and con- science ; when they cease to represent the highest Christian consciousness ; when they become unintelligible, then the truths which dogmas contain must be liberated from their traditional envelope and re-expressed in a manner which will once more enable them to touch and elevate the souls of men. In short, dogma must be subordinated to religion ; it GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 295 must follow and not dominate the living spirit of the Church. Note. — In this brief paper it has been im- possible to present the characteristics of modern German theology except in the most summary outline. The following books will assist the reader who wishes to make a study of the subject :— Historical : " Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit," von Ernst Tor- eltsch : an elaborate essay in a volume entitled Die Christlichc Religion, Berlin, Teubner, 1906; Die Kirche Deutchlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, von Reinhold Seeberg, Leipzig, Deichert, 1904 ; Geschichte und Kritik der neuern Theologie, von F. H. R. von Frank, bearbeitet und bis zur gegenwart fortgefuehrt von R. H. Gruetzmacher, Leipzig, Deichert, 1908. For a brief historical sketch see Die Religioesen Stroemungen der Gegenvoart, von H. Braasch, Leipzig, Teubner, 1904. The following are some of the principal books 296 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM on Christian doctrine :— (1) Books of the older Liberal school : Christliche Dogmatik, von A. E. Biedermann, Berlin, Reimer, 1884; Lehrbuck der Kvangelisch-Protestantisch Dog- matik, von R. A. Lipsius, Braunschweig Schwetschke, 1893 ; Grundriss der Christ lichen Glaubens and Sittenlehre, von O. Pfleiderer, Berlin, Reimer, 1898. (2) Books of the Ritschlian or " modern " school : Die Christ- liche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Ver- soehnung, von A. Ritschl, Bonn, A. Marcus, 1888; JVliat is Christianity ? by A. Harnack, London, Williams & Xorgate, 1904 ; The Communion of the Christian with God, by W. Hermann, London, Williams & Norgate, 1906 ; Dogmatik, von Julius Kaftan, Tuebin- gen, Mohr, 1901 ; Christliche Glaubenslehre, von Reischle, Halle, Niemeyr, 1904 ; Die Christliche Glaube, von Th. Haering, Stutt- gart, 1906 ; System der Christlichen Lehre, von H. H. Wendt, Goettingen, Vanden- hoeck und Ruprecht, 1906. (3) The history of religions movement: Die Absolutheit des GERMAN EVANGELIC LIBERALISM 297 Christentums in der Religionsgeschiclite, E. Troeltsch, Tuebingen, Mohr, 1902. The above list makes no pretension to be complete ; but it embraces the most represen- tative books. ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM BY The Rev. A. L. LILLEY If by Liberal theology we mean the attempt to justify the Christian faith to the intelligence of to-day, then nowhere has it found more sincere and adequate expression than in the Roman communion. It is certain Roman theologians who have recognised most clearly the conditions of the contemporary apologetic problem. Those conditions are of two kinds ; on the one hand the present-day conception of what knowledge is and how it is acquired, on the other the form of that traditional apolo- getic which has to be replaced. The first condition is the same for all the Christian communions, the second varies for each of them. 298 ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 299 It is exactly because the latter condition presents greater difficulties in the Roman Church than elsewhere that there the problem has been faced with perfect honesty and courage. It is only when life itself is at stake that the full powers of life are evoked. Self- preservation, a mere latent instinct in times of peace and safety, becomes a fully-developed capacity when destruction is imminent. That has been the case in Rome since 1870. In promulgating the Vatican decrees, Roman authority implicitly recognised that its spiritual Twentieth of September had arrived. Just as the prisoner of the local and political Vatican condemned and defied the whole world of modern politics and government, so it was a prisoner of the spiritual and scholastic Vatican who defied and condemned the whole world of modern thought. The syllabus of 1864 was something of a prophecy, for the doom which its condemnation of all that was politically alive and real entailed upon him who condemned it was not accomplished till 300 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM 1 87 0. So also the Vatican decrees were some- thing of a prophecy, for their condemnation of all that is living and real in thought took com- plete effect only when Leo XIII. forced the Church to become the prisoner of scholasticism by issuing the Encyclical jEterni Patris. It is impossible, then, to appreciate the full import of the modern Liberal movement in Roman theology without taking account of the necessity which called it into being and of the full extent of that necessity. In the Roman Church after 1870, and especially after the Encyclical of 1879, no apologetic was any longer possible, seeing that no common ground was left on which faith and reason could meet and conduct their eternal debate. Faith had excommunicated contemporary thought. It imposed itself henceforward by a single inclusive act of authority. Only a theological revolution could save religion for that section of the world which needs to think its religion in order to live it, and needs especially to think it because ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 301 it is living it and would live it more fully. The theological revolution, therefore, was forth- with declared in the Roman communion. Now Roman theology, thus liberated, was forced to recognise the universal conditions of a fruitful apologetic in our time. And because of the hardness of the necessity which constrained it, it recognised them more fully than they had been recognised elsewhere. Outside the Roman pale, apologetic was still alive. Mere authority was not sufficient as a guarantee of faith. Theologians still traf- ficked in the interests of religion with the thought of their time, and naturally drove the hardest bargain they could. The apologetic of the past was being gradually modified to meet the needs of the present. As always happens in such cases, the result was a series of partial and largely unreal compromises. But the Roman apologist had the advantage of making a fresh beginning. The apologetic officially recognised and even enforced in his own communion was a thing of the past. 302 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM It had no relation whatever with current habits of thought. He had no alternative but to set it aside in its entirety and devise a new one. He may not, indeed, have realised at once the full measure of the task he had undertaken, but it was not long before he was compelled to do so. What, then, the Roman theologian found, on girding himself to his task, was that he was in presence of a long religious tradition which he had inherited. This tradition had become identified at every point with the intellectual expression and justification of it which had sufficed in a distant past, but was no longer valid. The problem, therefore, was to preserve the tradition intact while replac- ing the intellectual forms under which it was apprehended. In doing this he was driven to consider more closely in what the permanent tradition consisted. He soon discovered that this tradition was a series of faith-affirmations concerning the character of the Power that was working in and through phenomena. ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 303 History witnessed to the fact that this tradition was as old as the race, that man was a religious being, that the Christian Church could trace its direct spiritual descent from the feeble beginnings of faith in Israel, and through Israel its collateral descent from many Oriental forms of faith no longer extant save in their trans- formed life among ourselves. He concluded, therefore, that human history, rightly conceived, was a religious history, the story of the " gesta Dei per homines," and that no Christian apologetic which overlooked this continuity of religious growth could successfully appeal to our age with its conception of history as a continuous, but vital, development. The non- religious historian might indeed account for the undoubted fact of historical development by alleging that it was the mere continuity of a mechanical process. But the religious historian could not do less than claim that the whole process was free and vital, that it was all the work of God through human wills which were free only because and only in so 304 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM far as they were expressing, however feebly and imperfectly, some aspect of the Divine Will. And when the religious historian made this claim, when he no longer conceived of God as merely intruding into history here and there in miraculous ways, when he ceased to shut out God from the general movement of history, then the non-religious historian would cease to be. For it was exactly this denial that had created that disturbing human portent. But, again, this revelation of God in history was a revelation through men, through the powers with which God had constituted men. It was men who recognised Him, even though they recognised Him in virtue of His own immediate inspiration. And, therefore, all re- ligion had its phenomenal side. Faith seized its divine object, but it seized it through the medium of human powers, powers which can only live through growth, and which find their expression in changing forms of thought and action and order. No achievement, whether in the realm of truth, of right, or of govern- ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 305 ment, is final. It is not final just because humanity is still growing. The absolute truth or right or order would have no meaning to us till we had ourselves grown into the absolute, and therefore ceased to be the creatures of time and change which we are. We are, indeed, in order that we may grow at all, rooted in the Absolute of truth and right which is God. We apprehend it immediately by faith as perfect Spirit working in our imperfect spirits. But there is here question only of that particular apprehension which mediates itself through thought and law and institutions and practical ideals of right. And such appre- hension is relative to the stage of growth which we have reached. Every external expression of religion therefore has its history. It belongs to the natural order, and is determined by the conditions which prevail in the natural order. Worship, dogma, Church organisation are natural expressions of the supernatural and Divine activity in the hearts of men which we realise for ourselves as faith, and have their 20 306 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM value only in so far as they are instrumental to faith. Where faith is alive, it will determine its own expressions, it will create the corre- spondence it needs between itself and the world of thought, of moral ideals, and of government. But let us look a little more closely at the work of analysis which the Roman Liberals have accomplished on the unsifted material of religious tradition. Let us take that particular expression of Christian faith which is called dogma. Dogma is the attempt of Christian faith to think itself accurately, to convert itself into terms of ordered thought, to place itself in some kind of living relation with the whole body of our knowledge. Now it is necessary that such an attempt should reflect the thought- forms, the conception and the substance of knowledge, of the time at which it was made, or rather, as dogma is usually a retarded crystallisation of thought, of the time when the conflict of opinion out of which it has issued was hottest. Xothing. therefore, can ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 307 be more transient than the thought-value of dogma. As a rule, its thought- value has been discounted, for the reasons just stated, even before it becomes dogma. History alone can show us, but it can always show us, how the one persistent faith in God, sometimes through the enlargement and intensification of its own vision, sometimes by reason of the new problems it has to face, has adapted and utilised ever new thought-forms for its expression, in order that it might remain the same essential faith through the different stages of its growth. When, therefore, we use any dogmatic state- ment to express our faith, we do not profess a belief either in the validity or in the adequacy of its thought-form. That may mean to us practically nothing, or it may be merely in- adequate. In any case, we are expressing our faith in a particular manifestation of the Divine character or activity which was origin- ally expressed through this form. And here there arises one of those considera- tions on which many of the Roman Liberals 308 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM have most strongly insisted, and which has more than any other given rise to a misunder- standing of their position. They have pointed out that no phenomenal fact can be the object of religious faith, that God alone is the object of faith, that facts are no more and cannot ever be more than the occasions of that faith. When we repeat the creeds we do not express our belief in facts, but our faith in certain aspects of the Divine character and activity occasioned by certain facts. The life and death of Jesus, for instance, were facts of history, yet they did not compel faith in Jesus as the Son of God or faith in the atoning efficacy of His death. They were merely the occasions of the spontaneous faith of the disciples in those Divine realities to which alone the creed desires to witness. But, it is replied, if the facts were the original occasion of the peculiarly Christian faith, then that faith still implies a belief in the historical reality of the facts. The Roman Liberal does not dissent from such an obvious proposition. ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 309 But he asks us to distinguish between those facts which in the creeds are connected with faith as its original occasions. Some of them are facts of history in the strictest sense. Their reality as historical happenings was manifest to immense multitudes of the con- temporaries of Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem, and that quite independently of the faith- import which a few of those contemporaries found in them. But there are other facts such as the Descent into Hell, the Resurrec- tion, the Ascension, and the Heavenly Session, whose reality lies altogether outside the pur- view of history. It cannot, indeed, be denied that there were certain fact-occasions of at least some of these truths of faith, though it is next to impossible for criticism to define their exact measure. But, whatever that measure may have been, faith outstripped it and represented as happening in the pheno- menal sphere what happened actually in the spiritual sphere. Such facts of the creed were really spiritual facts, spiritually discerned 310 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM but phenomenally conceived and represented. For us the phenomenal representation may prove invalid while the certainty of the spiritual fact remains. It is clear, for instance, that unless we are still to believe that Heaven is above the clouds, and Hell in the centre of the earth, we cannot understand the Ascension of our Lord and His descent into Hell as the early Christians understood it, and as indeed all Christians did at least down to the time of Galileo. Yet we feel no difficulty about using the forms of representation which were so long current in the Christian Church to express a faith which is as really ours as it was theirs. Again, our Lord's Resurrection is not a datum of history. 1 The historical data are the appear- ances to the disciples and the empty tomb. But. as one of the Roman Liberals has pointed out, the historian will not conclude from these facts to the resuscitation of our Lord's body. 1 So far, at least, as the Canonical Gospels are concerned. It is true that in the " Gospel of Peter : ' the Resurrection itself becomes a datum of history. ROMAN CATHOLIC LIBERALISM 311 He is forced by his own methods to exhaust all the many probable hypotheses to account for these facts before he accepts what will seem to him, as a historian, the most improbable. The Resurrection is for us as much an asser- tion of faith as it was for the disciples who believed that the Messiah of God could not be holden of death, as it was for St Paul who believed in it with the same invincible cer- tainty with which he believed in the general resurrection of the dead. Nor do we feel any difficulty about expressing our faith in it through a representation of its method which was the natural and inevitable medium of expression of that same faith for the first disciples. It is on these lines that Liberal Roman theology has attempted to outline an apologetic which will be sufficient to justify the Christian faith, in so far as it is really a faith and not an amalgam of faith and dead science, to contem- porary thought. Its merit is that it not only does not distrust the learning of our day with 312 ANGLICAN LIBERALISM its new methods, but that it welcomes it ana all the truth that it reveals as, on their own level, an immediate revelation of God. The certainties of faith are on a higher level, but they are not therefore and cannot be in conflict with the certainties of our other knowledge. On the contrary, the witness of the two planes of knowledge is consentient and complementary. It is impossible to say whether Roman Liberal- ism will succeed in transforming Rome. It cannot, of course, do so without in the process destroying the intellectual despotism which has done its best to paralyse that Church, and which must, if unchecked, succeed in paralysing it altogether. But whether the Liberal leaven succeeds in permeating the Roman lump or not, it is chiefly through the sincere and un- diluted quality which certain Roman theo- logians have imparted to that leaven — so, at least, it seems to the present writer — that it will work throughout Christendom to form the Church of the future. MUNTED BY WEILL AND OO., LTD., EDINBURGH. I I Date Due