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THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY

' O Army of th' Almighty God of Love !
Strong with omnipotence to bring to nought
The strength of Sin and Hell, why have men sought
Deliverance through thee in vain ? Why prove
Thy powers so weak in aught but civil war ?
Yea, while the foe of God unhindered wins
Hateful vict'ries, thou, deepest of all sins,
Usest thine arms Christ's very ranks to mar.
And this is done in His most holy Name
To honour Him : to keep His gospel pure !
O Love Benignant, Who didst all endure,
Bearing the burden of all human shame,
Dispel this darkness, melt our hearts of stone,
Shine forth as Very Love and make us one."

THE CHURCH AND
NONCONFORMITY

BY
THE VENB^ J. H. GREIG
ARCHDEACON OF WORCESTER

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1912
All rights reserved

" The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peace
able, gentle, easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good
fruits, without variance. And the fruit of righteousness
is sown in Peace, by them that make Peace."

PREFACE
No one is more conscious than is the present writer of the
slenderness of his equipment to write a book on a subject
so grave and difficult in itself, so complicated by passions
and prejudices. Left to myself I should probably never
have written a book at all, least of all on a matter so full
of hazards. But a few years ago I read to the Worcester
Diocesan Conference a paper on the Church and Non
conformity, and the Conference ordered that it should
be printed. The pamphlet which thus came into being
shared the usual fate of such " fugitive pieces." But I
was often asked to expand my main theses, till at last
a definite proposal for a book was made. As is generally
the case, I was led astray by almost imperceptible degrees,
and mine has been not so much a fall as a gentle declension
into authorship. Still the responsibility is wholly mine,
and I do not describe the genesis of the book as entitling
it to any indulgence.
But indeed my excuse for writing is my subject, and
that is not an excuse but a reason. Through our dis
union we are losing, and soon shall quite have lost, a
marvellous opportunity to do for Christianity in England
something by which all the world may benefit. Therefore
at this moment it is better to blunder than to be silent
about such matters as the price of disunion, the obstacles

viii PREFACE
of temper and how they may be met, the discords of
doctrine and opinion and how they may be resolved. To
correct my errors, expose my shallowness, point out the
flaws of my reasoning and reverse my conclusions will
draw some attention to the subject and help towards the
truth. There is a time for everything, and this is the
time to cry aloud about Unity.
So I make my appeal, not as a scholar or theologian or
philosopher, but as a plain man to plain men ; avoiding
as far as possible all technical language and over-abstruse
considerations. I do not see how it can be doubted that
it is sinful to live in our present condition of disunion ;
and that therefore it is unnecessary so to live, because it
is contrary to the Divine Will ; and that directly we (i.e.
the majority of us) seriously desire Unity it will begin to
come ; and that the attention of Christians cannot be
drawn too often to this question. Any finger-post, how
ever rough, has value just now if it points to Unity, even
though the road it indicates may be far from the best.
It will not have been set up in vain if it serves to remind
the merest handful of people that Unity is the goal to be
sought, the place to which we ought all to be trying to
find our way.
One word more. If I have done less than justice to the
views and motives of those with whom I cannot agree ;
or seem disdainful or lacking in respect and sympathy
towards their sincere convictions, I hereby frankly and
heartily express my great regret. I can truly say that if
I have been provocative, it is not only unintentionally,
but in spite of a most earnest wish to give legitimate
offence to none.

PREFACE ix
And with equal emphasis I would add that if in a desire
to be courteous towards those from whom I disagree, I have
given away a position or seemed to pare down a truth
which I ought to have maintained inviolate, I can wish
nothing else than to learn my error and submit to cen
sure. Reunion can be promoted even less by disloyalty
to Christian verities than by injustice to opponents.
For we shall never agree except " in the truth of God's
holy Word," and therefore to surrender or obscure any
portion of the truth is to postpone, not to advance, the
cause which I hope I truly wish to serve. J. H. GREIG.
Hartlebury Rectory.

CONTENTS
CHAP. I. Some Preliminary Thoughts .
II. Some Primary Results of our Disunion
III. The Need of the Right Temper
IV. The Formation of a Right Temper
V. Some Secondary Results of our Disunion in
Church Work at Home
VI. The Disunion of Christendom in its Effect
on the Extension of the Kingdom
VII. Our Differences. How shall we Proceed?
VIII. Where shall we Start ? .
IX. Some Features of Modern Nonconformist
Theology ......
X. The Sacraments 
XI. The Church, the Ministry, and the Episcopal
Principle ......
XII. The Church and the Ministry (continued)
The Non-Episcopal Ministry
XIII. Theories of the Church, and their Relation
to the Episcopate ....
XIV. Practical Steps .....
XV. Our Relation to the Roman Communion
XVI. Terms of Communion ....
Index ... ...

1
10
2131 40 50
60

80
9*
115 129 146179
208 228 247

THE
CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
CHAPTER 1
SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS
This book is the study of a disease, deep-rooted and of
long standing, slow in action but terribly weakening ; so
that, but for the presence of forces of an opposite kind,
complete paralysis if not dissolution would have been
brought about ere this. But the severity of the disease
is not the chief obstacle to recovery. More obstructive
still is the patient's indifference to his condition. In
vain are skilful diagnosis and the offer of right remedies
so long as the patient is content with his condition
and feels neither weakness nor pain nor desire to be
better. When pressed he admits that in theory he is
not quite sound, that things are not altogether as they
ought to be, and that perhaps he might be better. But
there is a world of difference between the admission " I
might be better" and the confession "I am really ill,"
and as long as a man stops short at the first he will
make no great efforts or sacrifice to secure improvement.
It is not until a man begins to be convinced that he is
actually seriously ill that he sends for a doctor and puts
himself under orders. Especially must the realisation
of his condition come first if he is aware that the only

2 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
possible method of cure is long and laborious and needs
much self-restraint.
Now there are signs, but for which this book would
be a sheer waste of time for writer and reader, that the
patient, the whole body of Christian people in this
country, is beginning to think that he may be in a
downright "bad way." Slowly but surely men are
beginning to realise that the relations of the various
Christian bodies to one another constitute a serious
disease in the body-religious; and that however clearly
we can trace its causes in long-past events; however
plain its history may be ; that it is neither other nor
less than a malady brought about by sin. It is the re
sult of evil temper, self-assertion, pride and obstinacy, so
blinding men's minds that even their religious beliefs and
conscientious convictions became the occasions and cause
of ill-will, unbrotherly bitterness, and avowed hatred.
We have solemn warning ' that what is given to us to
be our light may become our darkness ; and that if we
allow this to happen we shall plunge ourselves into
gloom indeed. Yet if we study that pathetic period in
our history when the relations of the Church and Non
conformity first took shape, we cannot fail to see that
it was a time when men's light became their darkness;
when things " given to them for their wealth became unto
them an occasion of falling." Religion, with all its
fervour, convictions, and honest scruples, obscured by
pride and passion, plunged Christendom into its darkest
period. What deeds of blackness and shame were then
wrought by men in the name and for the sake of what
was their light. The Inquisition, the Smithfield fires,
the Saint Bartholomew and its bloody reprisals, the
Thirty Years' War with its brutalising horrors, the
Camisades lasting on well into the eighteenth century,
1 St. Matthew vi. 23.

SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS 3
with their harryings and burnings and exultant murders,
all for conscience and for the true light as men held it.
We watch till we lose all desire to blame and condemn,
our wrath and indignation giving place to a sense of the
infinite pathos of that long period when Christian people
forgot to take heed lest the light in them became
darkness. Yet out of all that, and tainted and coloured by it,
spring the relations of the Church and Nonconformity.
They have become softened and ameliorated, thank God ;
but we can trace the descent in unbroken line. As time
went on they lost much of their savagery and ruthless-
ness. They had to admit other and moderating prin
ciples. The instinct of self-preservation compelled it,
lest the nation perish; but the sin in which they were
shapen goes on persisting and continuing till this day.
The Star Chamber, the pillory, Prynne's ears, Laud's
head, the ejection and sufferings of the clergy, the pro
scription of the Prayer Book, the Test Act, the Con
venticles Act, the Five Mile Act, the long-drawn torture
of the Irish and Catholic penal code, the Gordon Riots,
the stubbornly resisted repeal of the Test Act, the
grudging grant of Catholic Emancipation, these are
some links in the long chain of a descent which has no
break. We are still, though much more lightly, bound
to that unhappy past. Our Statute Books are clear
of all inequalities and disabilities; but the old malady
has not disappeared. There is more than a remnant
of antagonism, soreness, and suspicion. There is still
some eagerness to find (perhaps sometimes to invent) and
emphasize a fault, to snatch a chance to belittle; even
to lend the political agitator, in order to score a point
against the old enemy, the aid and prestige of a religious
body. The bludgeon and the bayonet are not the only
sort of weapon by which ill-will can gratify its wishes.

4 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
It is a coarse view of life that can see the degradation
of a quarrel between brothers only when it leads to
physical cruelty and bloodshed. Between those who
ought to love one another, the sneer, the cold shoulder,
envy, suspicion, a readiness to impute motives, are equally
baleful and destructive of the finer qualities of human
nature. The violent paroxysms of the past may be over ;
but the subtler work of the malady still continues, and
this book must contain not a little which is painful. But
a thorough diagnosis is essential to a cure, and any such
diagnosis must bring before us much that we do not like.
Yet the book is written in hope. For the patient is
beginning to be a little anxious, and the moment he is
roused enough earnestly to desire to grow well, his re
covery will begin and its completion is certain. For the
Healer to Whom he will go is the Author of Peace and
the Lover of Concord.
The present writer then regards disunion among
Christians as a disease which he proposes to examine
closely. He wishes to show how great is the damage it
does, to look into its nature, and at the end to suggest
certain steps which seem to him immediately practicable
towards recovery. But we must begin by trying to realise
how serious a disease it is.
We can only estimate the ravages caused by a disease
in an organism or body if we know something of the
condition of that body when in a state of health. In a
tribe whose eyesight was so poorly developed that no one
could see, or had ever been known to see, more than a
hundred yards, the feeble state of the organ of sight
would not even be suspected. So is it with the Christian
body in the matter of Unity at the present time. It has
parted with unity so long and so completely that it has
no idea how tremendous that loss is to it. A thoughtful
few who ponder deeply over principles ; a studious few

SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS 5
who know something vivid of the days when unity existed ;
have made lament and have urged reform in this direction
and effort after unity. But the vast majority, so vast as
to constitute the body, turn a deaf ear. No real reform
is ever easily brought about, least of all one of this kind.
We human beings like to think well of ourselves, and
even when we are forced to admit that in some matters
improvement is possible, we prefer to regard it as a step
from good to better, not from bad to good. That is
why it is so hard to carry through a real reform. It must
start by compelling (nothing short of compulsion does
it) people to admit that they have been in a wrong or
bad condition. The moment we attempt to do that they
hold us at arm's length as long as possible ; they call us
fussy or fanatic; the more knowing or cynical wonder
what axe we have to grind, or else they dub us prigs.
And if by chance the would-be reformer is right and the
conditions he wishes changed are bad, then the vested
interests of the wrong exhaust every artifice and all their
power before they can be expelled. You will get men to
admit that they might be better, so long as they can
retain a tacit understanding that they are not bad as they
are. Things might be improved, they will say ; but that
supplies no motive for a real reform. Silently and tena
ciously they cling to the thought that if some things are
not perfect about them, there is much that is quite well,
and they fall back on one of human nature's favourite
proverbs, Leave well alone.
Now history shows that corporate bodies are as prone
to this self-complacency as individuals ; and of all cor
porate bodies, none more so than religious ones. Indeed
the special temptation both of religious persons and
corporations will always be to self-satisfaction. It is so
gratifying to feel sure that we are in possession, while
others are not, of The Revelation ; that we know the

6 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
mind of God and are specially enlightened. Such privileges
confer a rank higher than any which the world-power
can bestow ; and the chastening, correcting voice which
bids us be humble and whispers, "Who made thee to
differ? What hast thou that thou didst not receive?"
can so easily be turned into a further compliment.
No religious person or body can ever afford to lose
sight of this danger. At any moment, just because
we are religious, we may become one of the arch
enemies of all real religion, a Pharisee — one who trusts
in God that he is righteous and despises others, as
the incomparable definition runs. Ceaselessly we should
be putting to ourselves the question, " What is wrong ;
what lack I yet ? " So only can we make that which
we have already received fruitful; and be prepared to
accept that further revelation without which the past
revelation will become stagnant, like standing water
into which no fresh springs are pouring. The alternative,
which this unceasing vigilance will alone avert, ought
ever to be in the minds of religious bodies and persons.
The paralysing influence of self-complacency is so great
and present a danger. Yet how continually religious
bodies succumb to it.
In the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in
Christian history, the stories of reformers and reforms
are always similar. They begin by the message being
unintelligible ; so hard is it to believe that any messenger
from God should really wish to put us right. Then
there follows an intense irritation at an attack being
made on the principles and practices of religion. This
is what a reform is generally called at first. The body
rises in its wrath and finds justification for its fury
and anger in the plea that it is repelling and repressing
an assault, not on itself, but on God ; and behind that
sacred plea there lurk the dark forms of envy, hatred,

SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS 7
and malice. The supreme instance is the history of
our Blessed Lord, whose rejection and death were mainly
due to the religious world of His day. He outraged
their self-complacency and was therefore accused of
blaspheming their God, an accusation which, in a most
awful sense, was only too true. But this is merely the
supreme instance, wherein the greatness of the resistance
is the measure of the greatness of the Reformer and His
reform. But on a lesser scale all through history you come
upon the same tale. It is most difficult to reform religious
bodies. They are slow to move, irritated and resistant,
precisely as we should expect them to be ; yet this very
fact constitutes the most marvellous feature of the story
of the Church and one of the great paradoxes of history.
For no body has ever shown such a wonderful capacity
for reformation. The self-complacent apathy of human
nature has been there. The consciousness of religious
privilege and the sense of superiority have been there.
The resistance of that self-satisfaction to the suggestion
of reform, and anger when at last the rebuke of truth
begins to sting, have been there. But in the darkest
hours, when all has seemed lost and the reformer perhaps
has been silenced for ever, the dawn of a better day
has begun to appear, and lo ! a reformation is effected.
So while none should deny or overlook the enormous
difficulty of a religious reformation, it should be equally
recognised that a Church reform is always worth attempt
ing and a most hopeful enterprise. To the world this
may seem a mere paradox, but to us it should be a very
practical truth. In dealing, for example, with such an
issue as that of reforming our present disunion, and even
more our contentment with that disunion, it is necessary
to dwell on both terras of the paradox. Restoration of
unity will only come as a reform. It will never take
place till Christian people see not only how good and

8 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
desirable a thing unity is in itself; but how deep a shame,
and how crippling a weakness, our present disunion is.
There must be a great act of corporate contrition and
repentance for what has been for so long a great
corporate sin. But before this can be attained we must
expect a prolonged resistance, at first of apathy and then
of anger — the two conditions of self-satisfaction before
and after the rebuke of truth gets home. We must not
expect to see it accomplished quickly or soon. There
will be many to urge that it is useless to try and reform
a religious body. They will tell us that there is no
conservatism so dense as that of a community of
religious people ; that no vested interests are so en
trenched and triply fortified as those of the Church.
And so probable and reasonable does this seem to be, that
we are likely enough to acquiesce unless we are equally
confident about the other term of the paradox. We
must be ready to reply that though all which has been
urged is true enough, yet the Christian Church and
Christian communities have undergone reform again and
again, and that we must be patient and persevering, and
then we shall see that what ought to be will be.
This at all events is no time for despair. Are not the
most immutable and self-complacent Christian commu
nities beginning to stir at last? There is ferment
in Rome, and though reactionaries have " collared the
machine" and are making the task of progress and
reform very hard, it must come. In an engine actually
at work with a good head of steam up, as Rome has, not
even the Curia can sit on the safety-valve permanently.
There is movement, too, in the Eastern branches of the
Church ; where new thoughts, ideas, and conceptions are
beginning to stir the placid, unchanged life of centuries.
It also is beginning to have new thoughts about union
and to look outside itself. And last but not least we

SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS 9
are being touched also in England. Our self-com
placency is disturbed. None of our English religious
bodies are content ; all feel that great and pressing
problems in national life remain unsolved, of which
Christianity alone has the key. We are dissatisfied as
to our own internal condition, and externally as to our
relations to one another. The great truth is beginning
to dawn, that we shall only solve the problem of applying
Christianity to national life, in proportion as we solve
the problem of our relations to one another. There seem
to be more than dim suggestions that such an idea is
abroad. Contentment with disunion is gone. We no
longer hear men speak, as actually they once spoke, of the
advantages of broken unity ; and the gain to the Christian
cause through the " competition of the Churches " !
It looks as if in all that great section of Western
Christianity which does not regard Rome as its centre
there is beginning to rise some sense of the shame and sin,
the dishonour to God and the loss to man, of our disunion
and schisms. The cloud at present may be no bigger
than a man's hand, but surely it heralds the end of the
long, hard drought.
Towards that end we are called to work, preparing the
way, perhaps mysteriously allowed even to hasten the day.
It will be a long task, certainly : so long, that before it is
finished our share in it here will be over and we shall
depart leaving it incomplete. It may therefore seem
more profitable to give our attention to some other issue
which promises to give us a more speedy return for our
labour. Yet it may be doubted whether among all the
many causes to which Christians can devote themselves,
be it as individuals, be it by taking part in a corporate
movement, there is anything at the present moment more
necessary, practical, and hopeful than to labour towards
the recovery of our lost unity.

CHAPTER II
SOME PRIMARY RESULTS OF OUR DISUNION
Braced by the double conception of the difficulty and
hopefulness of our task, let us now try to estimate the
extent of the evils caused by our disunion. To do this
we must ascertain what are the ideal and essential facts of
our relationship to one another or what we should be in
a state of health, and in this connection certain primary
truths stand out pre-eminent. To begin with, we are
bound to admit that as regards one fundamental fact of
transcendent importance we are always and inevitably
one. We share a unity which is essential and indestruc
tible. We are all children of One Father, even God,
and are therefore all members of one family, brothers and
sisters. It is this primary truth about our relationship
that makes our disunion so wrong and shameful. If we
were not always and essentially brothers and sisters,
members of the great family, having One Father, there
would indeed be practical loss in our want of cordiality
and co-operation ; but there would be nothing like the
same shame and sin. Even our quarrels, though they
would still be very wrong and regrettable, would not have
that special heinousness and degradation which must ever
attach to a standing and bitter feud between brothers and
sisters. In ordinary life we instinctively recognise this. The
pity and loss, the actual disgrace of such a dispute are
felt by even the most casual onlooker. The spectacle of

PRIMARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 11
two brothers constantly passing one another in the street
without a sign of recognition ; still more, going out of
their way to injure one another's business or reputation; or
joining eagerly and gladly in any scandalous stories which
truly or untruly may be spread about each other; such
acts as these on the part of children of the same father,
elicit the stern condemnation even of men not over sensi
tive about points of morality. We feel that however
great the provocation, a man ought not to behave like that
to his brother. And if we try to analyse the reason for
this strong feeling, we find that it consists in part of a
realisation of the fact that these close relationships are
very precious and sacred things. This makes their mis
use so great a shock to our innate moral sense. It is
bad enough that things inanimate and indifferent, to
which no special worth belongs, and for which we can feel
no sentiments of reverence, should be used for low or
cruel purposes. But when it comes to things which we
all know to be good and beautiful being so degraded,
when, for instance, a mother uses her influence or oppor
tunities to lead her child astray, or when brother injures
brother, then we feel we are confronted by no small sin.
But not only do we feel sad at heart. We feel also
some indignation, some resentment, as if it were a matter
which compelled us to make a protest. And that feeling
is a rightful one. Society is hurt by such quarrelling.
The constitution of the family, the knitting together
in mutual love and goodwill of its members, is perhaps
the highest and most practically useful of all the, so-
called, natural possessions of humanity. The true home,
with its atmosphere of love, affords a nation almost the
only chance it has of seeing its children grow up into
men and women of high character. A quarrelsome,
cantakerous family is a national evil ; not a mere loss,
a negative thing, but a positive harm that pro-

12 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
duces bad just where good results might be properly
expected. And again, there is at least one deep cause for our
feeling that anything like publicity in a family quarrel
is vicious and wrong. It lies in our conception of the
actual oneness of members of a family. If your brother
has indeed done wrong and behaved badly, whether it be
to you or to another, it is to some extent your shame
and your wrong ; for you and your brother cannot quite
be separated, and you cannot help having some responsi
bility for him. He is in some true sense, as the very
pronoun you use in regard to him implies, yours, your
brother, and you cannot decently publish your own shame.
Now all these thoughts apply, and should be applied
by us, however sadly, to our Christian quarrels and
disunion. Our relationship is no figment or metaphor.
It is not less real, rather it is more real than human
relationships. For the Fatherhood of God is not an
idea which we apply to Him, because in Him we think
there is a faint resemblance to what we know of human
fatherhood. On the contrary, it is the divine Fatherhood
which is perfect and real ; and human fatherhood, which
is a faint reflection, marred by sin and imperfect through
weakness, of the great and supreme Fatherhood of God.
And the reality of God's Fatherhood must be the measure
of the reality of our sonship. I am more, that is more
deeply and truly, God's son, than the son of my earthly
parents. Not only because I may at any moment be
come an orphan as far as they are concerned ; but because
countless ages after both they and I have grown up into
the Perfect Man and are one in Him, we shall still all
be the children of Our Father in heaven.
But the reality of our sonship is in its turn the measure
of the reality of our brotherhood. That too has in it
the note of eternity which belongs to perfect reality.

PRIMARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 13
We cannot be quite sure what will happen to the natural
ties of family, of brothers and sisters after the flesh. But
we are quite sure that in the family of God the only
development will be that we shall become more com
pletely and absolutely brothers.
It is worth while, and no digression, to have dwelt on
this fact, which is our primary call to reunion, and short
of that, to shame and contrition and repentance for our
unbrotherly disunion, our long quarrel, our continued
aloofness. We could not suffer such things to continue
if we realised the truth which we all so readily state
with the lips, that we are of one family, having One
Father and One Elder Brother Whose example we are
to follow. We can only continue content with division
because in our innermost heart we regard this sublime
truth about our relationship as a figure or a metaphor;
whereas it is literal fact. Here as in every other matter
it is the spiritual which is real, which will abide and
persist, which has in itself the element of eternity. It
is the material and physical which are unreal and
ready to pass away. It is my spiritual Father and my
spiritual brethren who are my real Father and my real
brethren. So the quarrel between these real brothers and sisters
is the most heinous and degrading and degraded form of
family quarrel. It announces itself to be so in that no
feud, no vendetta, has ever been so ruthless, brutal, and
pitiless. It is taking the best and highest gift for the
lowest and worst purpose. And no feud does so much
harm to society and mankind. That fact, too, is patent
in history, for I really think the worst citizens, the men
who do most to check the progress of mankind and to
arrest the elevation of human character, are bigots and per
secutors, and the kind of character which, under the influ
ence of Christian disputations and quarrels, approaches

14 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
to bigotry and persecution. For such men make religion
and spiritual truth and God's revelation, the sources from
which true human advance alone can come, seem repul
sive and even hateful. They poison for mankind the
springs of goodness at their source. And whereas a
tyrant or a criminal, though he may do harm in a small
circle for a time, makes vice seem unlovely and cruelty
hideous ; a hard, contemptuous, bigoted Christian, the
product of disunion, though he may do a little good in a
small way, on the wider scale makes the knowledge of
holy things seem baleful and goodness unlovely.
The family of God, broken up by quarrels and divided
as it is to-day, cannot help producing many whose
Christianity is harsh, strident, self-assertive, disdainful,
suspicious, bigoted. Here and there in every communion
are men and women who so catch "the meekness and
gentleness of Christ " that, though they grow up in this
divided and unhappy home, it is the Elder Brother of
Whom they remind men. But they are few where they
might be many, and God and man alike want every
single one of this type that can be produced.
But there is a further consideration which adds a still
further element of wrong-doing to the disputes and
dissensions of the family of God. We are brought into
it and made members of it by a most gracious act, in
order that we may make known to others the great love
of God for mankind. We are to live in the world and to
make it a better place, leading our fellow-men to oelieve
in and realise a fellowship with God, through our fellow
ship with one another. The fights and wars and self-
seeking of natural men are to be shamed by the spectacle
in their midst of a community in which love reigns
supreme, and in which all the degrading elements of
strife and contention are unknown. There is reason to
believe that but for this Christians might be translated

PRIMARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 15
from this world as soon as they have heard and responded
to the divine call. But He leaves them in the world on
purpose that they may be to it as salt and light.
Not only, then, does our disunion give the lie to our
relationship to God and one another: it prevents us
from fulfilling the chief, immediate purpose for which
God made us members of His family. We are not
baptized and given all the Christian privileges which
attach to admission into His Kingdom because He loves
us more than the rest; but because He saw in us,
having created us for that purpose, something which
would fit and enable us to make known His Nature and
Character to others.
That then being the Divine purpose for each individual,
the Christian community fails entirely both as a place of
training for the souls entrusted to it, and collectively
to set forth those primary truths for which God called
into being, when it is rent asunder by dissensions and
contentions. There can be no doubt that failure to
approximate to this ideal of unity, and at present even
to try to begin approximating to it, has more to do with
the failure of Christianity at home and abroad than any
other sin.
The evangelisation of the heathen must have been, and
must be, far more hindered by our disunion than by any
other internal cause or any external obstacle. Not what
we call false religions, not the obstinacy of Moham
medanism, nor the false attractions of Buddhism, nor the
self-contented, high-bred conservatism of Confucianism,
and not the resistance of the powers of evil ; but that
paralysis of Christian effort that comes of disunion ; that
gross and patent contradiction by the Christian com
munity, of the principal tenet that it preaches and on
which it stands ; that is chiefly what prevents the triumph
of the Gospel.

16 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
The entire Christian revelation is one of love. Not
a sentimental, emotional gush, but true love. If the
Christian world does not stand for that, it stands for
nothing; if that is not its basis,- it has none. The
entire system both of Christian doctrine and ethics has
this essential characteristic, that it believes in fellowship
and unity. The object of the Christian preaching, and
especially the proclamation of the Incarnation, is declared
by St. John to be this : " That ye may have fellowship
with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and
His Son Jesus Christ." Nothing, therefore, short of
fellowship will enable the Christian family to do its
work. No mere abstention from torturing, burning, and
harrying each other; no removal of penal statutes and
establishment of equality before the law, will suffice.
There must needs be mutual kindness, goodwill and
fellowship, and not until these things exist among us,
and find their natural organic expression in unity of life,
shall we cease to contradict the very essence of our re
lationship to one another and to God.
Again, there is another aspect of the same matter
hardly less fundamental. We are enlisted as soldiers
to fight side by side against the common enemies of God
and man. That warfare is hard and grim enough, for
" we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness of
this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places,"
and the exhortation to "put on the whole armour of
God," and to be sober and vigilant, is not exaggerated
in its earnestness. But what advantage can there be in
putting on the whole armour of God if we turn our
weapons against one another ? How can we expect
clearly to hear the word of command when our ears are
full of the din of a battle waged in our very ranks ? And
as our hearts are inflamed and filled with mutual passion

PRIMARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 17
to slay or get the better of one another, how can we
expect that they will also be filled with any keenness to
smite down the foes of God and of Christ ? Nay, even
when we have ceased to strike at and fight against each
other (as perhaps we may now claim that we have learnt
to do, at least in part), how greatly we contribute to the
strength of Satan and evil, by our refusal to co-operate
in the common work; and by insisting that, though of
course we must attack evil or heathenism, we must do it
separately and without reference to each other. An army,
the various regiments and arms of which though they do
not fire on one another, will only assail the enemy in
detail, will be infinitely more than doubling the strength
of its opponents. Nothing so adds to the power of sin
and wickedness, nothing so contributes to the continued
existence of the dark places and cruel habitations of the
earth, as the disunion of the army of Christ. We talk of
the organisation of evil, of the solidarity of the different
forms of sin, of the way in which such things as drink,
lust, and gambling cling together and aid and abet each
other, and it pleases us to shift on to these forces and
alliances the blame of the slow progress made by the
Kingdom of God. But all these things are nothing in
comparison with the want of solidarity, the absence of
alliances, and therefore the feebleness and the disorganisa
tion of the forces which in name rank themselves under
the leadership of the One Captain of our Salvation.
But the obstruction by Christians of the very work
which Christians exist to fulfil has a still further and
more disastrous result. Our disunion strikes at the very
heart of our faith, which is the revelation, made to us in
order that it may be made by us to others, of the Nature
and Character of God. In a very careful declaration of
faith made by the Congregationalists of England in 1658,
after the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity has been most
B

18 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
plainly declared, it is added that " this doctrine of the
Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God
and comfortable dependence on Him"; and this con
fession is profoundly true. It is not so much " of the
essence " as actually " the essence " of Christianity that it
reveals God as eternal and absolute Love. All that our
Holy Faith teaches is founded on the great fact, therefore,
that God is no monad, abiding eternally in aloofness and
solitude, but that He Himself is eternal Fellowship,
dwelling in the glory and bliss of eternal, perfect, and
mutual love. It is this characteristic of the Divine
nature finally revealed to us by the Incarnation and the
Coming of the Holy Ghost that makes, and alone makes,
the ideas of incarnation, redemption, and sanctification at
all intelligible, or even thinkable. So that our English
Congregationalists of the seventeenth century were indeed
declaring the very heart of evangelical truth when they
set forth in almost Athanasian language, that "in the
unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one
substance, power and eternity, God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Ghost," and proclaimed that this
belief in the nature of the Godhead was the foundation
of all our communion with God and comfortable de
pendence on Him.
But if love and fellowship are essentially and absolutely
the nature of God, what place can disunion and mutual
aloofness have among us, who are not only called to
be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, but also
to cause the knowledge of God to cover the earth?
Christian people, as such, have no other raison d'etre than
to make known God. All our organisation and preaching,
and all the means of grace, have this for their sole end.
Life eternal is to know God, and the supreme means of
grace, the Incarnation of the Eternal Son, only emphasises
this central truth. It was because nothing short of

PRIMARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 19
direct personal knowledge of God would meet the needs
of humanity that God Himself came among us. No
declaration of a code of truth, no communication to us
of the facts of our life and being in relation to God,
would suffice. Man must know God ; and therefore that
"higher gift than grace — God's Presence and His Very
Self" — dwelt among us. But how can we in our con
tradiction of fellowship, our flagrant want of mutual love,
our hot discussions, our cold disdain, our mutual suspicions,
and above all our contentment with such conditions —
how can we possibly set forth this great, essential, funda
mental truth about God ? No, not only can we not set
it forth, we cannot even ourselves discern or apprehend
it, except in the very dimmest, feeblest manner. This is
the real heavy price of our disunion. It is not that we
are ourselves confused, and confuse others, about the
means of grace and the heavenward road ; making it
hard for men to know what to think about ministries and
sacraments and matters of that sort. That would be
very grave ; but it would matter far less than it does, if
at the same time we gave them clear, plain views of God
as Love and Fellowship and tenderness and benignity and
blessed peace. But in our disunion we cannot do this.
We may repeat the Holy Words, but the fullness and force
of their meaning, their winning beauty, their life-giving
glory, which ought to be expressed so that the world can
see them in the fellowship and love and peace of the
Family of God, are unrealised and all but unknown. We
have plain warning and instruction. Does not St. John
say, " If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen,
how can he love God Whom he hath not seen ? " We
assent readily enough to that statement, but we fail to
see its application to ourselves. We may be aware of the
Biblical truth, " God is Love," and of its theological ex
pression in the priceless doctrine of the Blessed Trinity ;

20 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
and we may have no intellectual quarrel or difference
about the truth so expressed ; but we cannot on that
account either know or love, understand or proclaim that
Benignant Love, our personal God, until we have opened
our being and nature to be filled by His own Spirit
shedding abroad the Love of God in our hearts. That is
the real and awful price then which we pay for our broken
unity, our factions, our parties, our terrible " religious
press." They strike at the very heart of all spiritual
religion, impairing and distorting our ideas of God,
rendering our corporate life the standing contradiction of
our central corporate tenet.
If there be a calm onlooker from • another sphere
watching the affairs of this world of ours, surely nothing
can be more amazing to him than the proclamation of
the God of love and light and peace, by a Christendom
confused, darkened, and torn by passionate disputes,
or cold aloofness.

CHAPTER III
THE NEED OF THE RIGHT TEMPER
Our disunions, like all quarrels, especially those between
men who have been, and ought to be, affectionate friends,
or brothers, contain two distinct elements. There are
the matters in dispute ; the questions about which there
was originally the difference of opinion, and over which
the quarrel broke out. Then, closely connected, but
quite distinguishable, there is the temper to which the
dissension has given rise, the mutual animosity, the
mistrust by each of the other's goodwill and kindness :
or it may even be, a downright conviction of mutual
ill-will, not unsupported by corroborative evidence. When
you are estimating the chances of, or attempting, a
reconciliation, both these elements must be carefully and
dispassionately weighed. It is useless to take any steps
towards or even to suggest a reunion until you have
done your best to understand the present temper of
both parties and the nature and gravity of their differ
ences. Sometimes it will appear that the cause of the
quarrel is quite unimportant, and then the peacemaker
can concentrate his effort upon the ill-temper, soreness,
and chagrin which many hard words and much unkind-
ness have engendered. Even in such a case the pacificator
may find that though the matter in dispute proves to
be very trifling, yet reconciliation is hopeless, because
passions are still acute. He may be sure that if only
he could get both sides into a calm judgmental frame

22 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
of mind his task would be over; for they would then
admit at once that there never had been, and certainly
was not, any ground for bitterness or broken friendship.
In such a case the peacemaker would feel that all he
had to do was to deal with the temper of the two
parties in order to make peace.
On the other hand he might soon perceive that there
were real and grave differences; points of first-rate
importance in which the whilom friends cannot see eye
to eye ; and that these have to be considered and removed
as well as the matter of temper, before complete recon
ciliation and a return to the old unity and co-operation
can be achieved. In such a case the peace-making task
must be much more difficult and complicated ; especially
when temper has run very high, and the points of
difference have been both numerous and grave.
The work of reconsidering the points at issue is strictly
necessary, but they are so embittered, every memory
connected with them is so entwined with a past of
anger and menace, that the mere mention of their names
inflames passions afresh. We have all known, perhaps
by personal experience, well-meant efforts at patching up
a quarrel which have led to a renewal and intensifying
of the feud that they were intended to heal. The parties
met and began to talk one to another in quite a friendly
fashion ; and soon and smoothly the matter over which
the quarrel began was reached. It may be that previous
to the meeting both sides had felt how small and in
adequate the matter was, as a ground for breaking a
friendship; but before they have been talking of it
for three minutes the old anger bursts out again, and
after a scene of recrimination and strong angry words,
they part from one another, further from unity than
ever. What caused this? It happened because there
had grown up in the minds of both such associations

NEED OF THE RIGHT TEMPER 23
of pain and angry disputation, that a calm discussion
was out of the question. Even a keen sense of humour
will not always avert such a catastrophe, no, not even
if both sides possess that great gift in full development.
This complication of differences meets us in our present
matter. Stormy and harsh was the temper on both sides,
and that not for a mere decade, but enduring through
generations. Mutual dislikes, which have come to be
almost inveterate and invincible, are joined in too many
minds with something like an unwillingness to learn that
the other side is not so black, so ignorant, so ignoble,
so prejudiced as it has all along been painted. Such
a mood dies hard ; and there has been so much to keep
it alive. Moreover, it had such a terribly splendid start.
The temper so generated was very malevolent at first,
and when, through the amelioration of manners, it ceased
to ill-treat, it became disdainful of its opponents; and
disdain is in many ways both the worst form of persecu
tion and the most difficult of all injuries to forgive.
And this traditional ill-will has reacted on, and been
associated with, grave differences about important doc
trines, in themselves serious enough ; till it has grown to
be impossible to get these doctrines rationally and quietly
discussed. The very mention of certain words and certain
phrases is enough to cause a rise of temperature so sharp
as to make it out of the question that any calm explana
tion of the meaning attached to the words can be either
offered or listened to.
At best and at worst, what a poor little and compara
tively meaningless word is " Mass." Of all the names or
titles given to the Holy Communion it is in itself by far
the least expressive and assertive. It should therefore be
the least irritating and the one that we could use with
least offence. But such are its associations that on
thousands of our fellow-countrymen, shrewd, thoughtful,

24 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
unsentimental men of business many of them, it has the
same effect as scarlet on the emotions of a bull. When
they hear it, its very sound is charged with passion-
rousing power. It stirs in them subconscious memories
of the gross idolatry forbidden by the Old Testament,
and also of the dungeons and torture-chambers of the
Inquisition. They see again the fires of Smithfield, or a
group of English sailors dressed in yellow for a Spanish
auto da fe. They cannot bear this word Mass, or think
about it ; they can only feel tumultuous emotions.
Yet to other Christian men, not less good and intel
ligent and sincerely religious, that same small and, in
itself, unmeaning word has a halo of beauty, and associa
tions with the most sacred and spiritual worship of their
lives. Historically it is connected indissolubly in their
minds with the heroic deeds of simple, high-minded
men, who cheerfully risked detection by the spies of
Walsingham and Cecil, and were ready to face an
awful martyrdom, even the unspeakable tortures of the
Tower of London, and the most ghastly death of being
hung, drawn and quartered, all gladly to be borne if
only a few poor sheep here and there in England might
be fed with the Bread of Life, according to the com
mand of Christ and for the love of the adorable Name
of Jesus.
" Apostolic succession " is another phrase of such
blessed and cursed import that comparatively few are
those who can consider it calmly. To one it expresses
that which the Church cannot dispense with, while to
others it signifies a superstition now quite outworn, a
mechanical theory into which no grace or spirituality
can be read ; and one which banishes Christ to an ever
greater and greater distance in the background of the
ministerial commission. To one it conjures up a long
series of persecutors and persecutions; of great men

NEED OF THE RIGHT TEMPER 25
living in ease surrounded by wealth and luxury and ob
sequious minions, hounding poor tinkers and peasants to
prison or pillory. To others it will suggest a succession of
wise and able men, many of them of quite humble birth,
standing fearless before angry kings, or pleading alone
and unabashed before the aristocracy of their country,
strong for the cause they believed to be right. Or again
there will rise up pictures of the silent martyrdom, the
scenes of privation, indigence, and starvation set forth in
such brief, business-like fashion in the pages of Walker's
immortal book.
To many again the phrase the " Catholic Church " has
something of melody, conjuring up visions of a perfect
mother, wise, tender, strong, self-sacrificing. Or they
see it marching forward strong in faith and hope and
love, conquering and to conquer. In vain does the great
Empire oppose ; " the little flock " is invincible. And
when its efforts to give fresh life to the worn-out polity
and civilisation of Rome prove to be in vain, and the
pagan hordes pour in and overrun the Empire, it is the
Catholic Church that conquers the conquerors. It en
dures, scattering wide through Europe its fertile seed, the
blood of its martyr missionaries, in every country and
tribe, winning them for Christ. And they would urge
that if the Name of Jesus is at all loved in England, we
owe it to the Catholic Church.
For others the thoughts which to these same two words
give rise are perhaps expressed most vividly by Bunyan's
lurid picture of the old Pope sitting insatiable at the
mouth of his cave, surrounded by the bones of his count
less victims. They regard Catholic and papistical or
popish as synonyms ; as the attribute of their hereditary
and bitter foe, the exponent of worldliness, intrigue,
externalism, tawdriness, and unspirituality.
And so it comes to pass, that just when and where

26 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
calmness of judgment is most essential it is least to be
looked for. It does indeed appear as if the needed were
not to be had. That which the position demands is for
the men of one sort to ask themselves, Why do all these
good, holy, well-instructed Christians, who love God and
Christ as much as I do — why do they frequent the Mass
week by week, rising early for the very purpose ? And
how can it be that not one or two of them for a short
time, but thousands and thousands of them for generation
after generation find in it the occasion and vehicle of
their highest spiritual worship ? And equally we want
men of the opposite school to ask themselves, What is
there about this Mass — or perhaps about the way we use
it, or some of the things we say about it — but what is
there connected with the Mass, which I so value and
love and from which I gain such unspeakable refreshment
and help ; what is there that makes all these good,
earnest, devout people, who love God and Christ as
sincerely as I do, loathe the very name of the Mass, so
that even to mention it causes them either anger, panic,
or contempt ?
We want those who believe in and value the Apostolic
succession to try and penetrate into the very heart of
what those who are so indignant about it feel. You
cannot capture an enemy's position and turn him out of
it until you get into it yourself. We need sympathy
and understanding to capture a theological position and
make others abandon it. The fear of Apostolic succes
sion has in it elements with which we all ought to
sympathise; and until those who uphold the principle
attain that sympathy they will not carry their opponents
with them. But conversely it is necessary to attain a
wise and intelligent comprehension of the reasons why
men, as earnest and spiritual as, let us say, the Noncon
formists themselves, feel that the principle of Apostolic

NEED OF THE RIGHT TEMPER 27
succession is not a matter that can be waived, because they
regard it as a gift of God.
So too with the connotations and associations of the
words Catholic and Protestant. Perhaps of these specially
we want a patient and sympathetic analysis of what each
party means and understands by its use of each of these
words. " I thank God I am a Catholic, and I thank God
I am not a Protestant," says A, quite solemnly and
sincerely. " I thank God I am a Protestant, I thank
God I am not a Catholic," says B, with equal fervour,
sincerity, and solemnity. What is really most necessary
is that A, the Catholic, should discover what B, the
Protestant, means ; and then what he means himself.
It would take a good long time to do it ; for it is useless
to do it superficially. He must do it, too, with a strong
conviction that B loves God and Christ and is a prayerful,
devout man. He must think of him as the kind of
Protestant depicted by Cardinal Manning in his de
scription of many an English Protestant. " My personal
experience of those outside the Church confirms all I have
written about the doctrines of grace. I have known
intimately souls living in faith, hope, and charity, and
the sanctifying grace of the Seven Gifts of the Holy
Spirit; in humility, in absolute pureness of life and
heart; in constant meditation on Holy Scripture, in
unceasing prayer, in complete self-renunciation, in per
sonal work consecrated to the poor, having in a word a
visible holiness as evidently the work of the Holy Spirit
as I have ever seen." Such is the Cardinal's description
of Protestants not a few, for he concludes the passage
which I have just quoted by the words, "I have
seen this in whole families, among the rich as well as
among the poor, and in all ranks of society." It is the
thankfulness of persons of that kind for not being
Catholics, and for being Protestants, that a Catholic

28 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
ought to investigate till he understands and sympathises
with it.
And the converse holds true. The people who would
be deeply thankful that they are not Protestants, if so
wild an idea ever crossed their minds, and are continually
thanking God in effect that they are Catholics, include
in their number men and women of the highest erudition,
the most humble and sincere love of God, the most con
tinual prayerfulness, and a devotion, self-denial, and love
for the poor and outcast, whether lepers, convicts, or the
helpless, that they can only have learnt at the feet of
Jesus. It is the reason why such people thank God for
being Catholics, and thank Him, too, that they are not
Protestants, that a Protestant has got to understand and
sympathise with. Three hundred years ago men might
have felt that there was no need for such questioning.
It was possible in those days for each side to regard the
other as blinded by Satan to the truth of God ; and
therefore as holding views which no Christian man need
examine. That, in fact, was how each party viewed the
other. But only the essential stupidity and blindness of
ill- temper can continue to think so now. No Protestant
can account for Catholicism, whether Roman, Eastern, or
Anglican, by referring it to the devil. No Catholic can
think of Protestantism in that way either. Even so long
ago as forty years, and in an atmosphere so ultramon
tane as the Vatican Council, the brave remonstrance of
Bishop Strossmayer caused an official withdrawal of the
statement that Protestantism was the fountainhead of
Naturalism and an unclean thing. We have — I cannot
say enjoyed, but experienced, three hundred years of each
other's existence, and it is plain beyond all dispute to us
all, that whatever wrong and evil, error and darkness,
there may be in the doctrine and system of the other
side, there is also much that is good, holy, enlightened,

NEED OF THE RIGHT TEMPER 29
and right. It may be, and indeed it is, true that they
behaved very badly to us ; but on that score two con
siderations must silence us. First, we behaved just as
badly to them ; and secondly and more cogent still, it is
precisely in the greater readiness to forgive and forget
past injuries, that there lies the strongest proof of our
superior orthodoxy. We cannot even flatter ourselves,
much less persuade others, that we know the mind of
Christ unless we are guided by the Spirit of Christ ; and
that Spirit is one not only of reasonableness but of sweet
reasonableness. It has the insight, the understanding,
and penetration not merely of acute intelligence but of
sympathetic intelligence.
Now who can doubt that we have reached the stage,
when not a few leading minds only on each side, but the
whole body of instructed opinion on each side, ought to
see that the time has fully come for studying each other's
position with intelligent sympathy, or, perhaps more ac
curately, sympathetic intelligence. It will certainly be
long before such an agreement is reached as alone can
serve as a basis for a common life and organisations.
But the mere effort widely made would sweeten the
world. Our first task must be the creation of such a temper
as this, in place of the old temper that has kept us apart.
And such a temper can only come by prayer, together
with such individual and concerted action, as may be sug
gested to us by Him to Whom we pray. We must not
wait till we feel a desire for unity ; such an emotion will
be in many characters hard to achieve. Moreover, if it is
achieved as a feeling it will be worth but little. We
must rather deepen in ourselves, by much thought and re
flection thereon, a lively sense of the great shame it is to
us, and the hindrance it is to God's work and man's salva
tion, that we should be disunited. It is out of a conviction

30 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
that this disunion is our sin, that the prayer for its re
moval will spring with power. The will for reunion will
thus be strengthened, and become a settled purpose, and
then whether we feel the desire for reunion or not is a
small matter ; because we shall so act as to promote it.

CHAPTER IV
THE FORMATION OF A RIGHT TEMPER
Our first aim, then, will be the formation in ourselves,
and as far as in us lies in others also, of a particular
temper. It will be the temper of one who, convinced of
the sin of disunion, believes in reunion as God's will, and
is therefore ready to work for its achievement. This
temper, yes, and even the desire and prayer to be possessed
by it, will move us far from the common temper of our
day, in regard to either disunion or reunion. I am not
thinking of such political hindrances as the cry for the
disendowment of four already poor dioceses, or for the
removal from the Church of her schools, or the refusal to
grant facilities for the teaching of other religious views in
" one-school areas," any more than of such phenomena as
we see daily in Ireland and such extensions of Ireland
as Liverpool. These are all anachronisms, and are the
natural result of allowing large portions of the kingdom
to lag far behind the rest in education and culture. We
must expect that such parts of the country will show the
signs of their backwardness. As countries you cannot
accuse either England or Scotland of religious bigotry:
that belongs to Wales and Ireland ; and in time they no
doubt will see this unsightly growth slough off, as it has
done for the most part in the rest of the kingdom. All
religious parties, too, are fast learning that what is offered
to a religious body by politicians when making " a plat
form," is always a Greek gift, and terribly costly to the

32 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
recipient. Such happenings as these do not count for
much more than an added friction. They are not the real
obstacle or hindrance, which lies embedded deeper in the
road and is far harder to remove. The real difficulty is
that for all people, and perhaps especially for us English, it
is always very hard to begin and continue to be enthusiastic
about a far-off ideal which no one has ever known. We
so very much prefer to busy ourselves over a task that we
can bring to a conclusion. To set forth deliberately to
accomplish something which we know that neither our
children nor our grandchildren will see, is not our char
acteristic. Particularly are we averse to such an enter
prise when we cannot see clearly exactly what the ultimate
object is nor by what steps and actual means it can be
attained. As a race we are not of Dorothea Casaubon's
mind, when she says : " I have a belief that by desiring
what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of
the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light
and making the struggle with darkness narrower."
Yet most certainly this is a very profound truth, and we
should all be more efficient in practical work if we bore it
in mind. There are indeed difficulties to surmount. But
it is assuredly obvious that that which is " perfectly good "
can rarely, if ever, be so vividly present to our minds as to
allow us to describe it accurately, or even to feel sure that
we know its precise form. And again, that which is per
fectly good is as a rule so remote from what actually
exists that we cannot always know what road to it is best
or most direct. The result is that the really great aims
of life are apt to be pursued by very few. The vast
majority, when it is suggested to them that they should
take up the pursuit of some grand ideal, make no true
response. They are very apt to ask those who make the
suggestion to explain precisely what they mean and to

FORMATION OF A RIGHT TEMPER 33
detail all the steps which must be taken to realise their
idea. They will inquire also what chances there are of
success and how soon it may be attained. And then
generally it is the case that the advocates of the ideal
have to admit that they can draw no very exact picture
of their object ; nor dogmatise as to the precise pro
gramme by which it is to be achieved. Nor can they
hold out hopes that it will become a concrete embodied
fact in a hundred or even two hundred years. So the
English mind turns away with some impatience and dis
dain. It regards such things as Carlyle regarded poetry,
as a pursuit a little artificial, just a shade " falsetto-
toned," one of the "half credibilities" that he so loved
to kick. The cry of the English mind is, Let us have
something that we can do. Let us not waste our time
and our life on these visionary nebulous ideas, when there
are so many definite jobs that men can start and finish.
But it is worth while to reflect that an ideal is by its
very nature something rather to be apprehended in and
by the spirit, than set forth, appraised, and described by
a medium so imperfect as human language. It is wise
to remember also that an ideal is so remote from us that
no one has ever had an actual experience of its attain
ment, that we can only point to a general direction of
advance, that there will be no road thither at all, not
even a well-ascertained method of progression. The ideal
is far, far beyond the attained, and those who set out on
the journey are pioneers, confronted and checked at every
step by jungle, by the thorny, dense tangle of the un-ideal.
We must hack the path inch by inch, foot by foot, glad
if at the end of our day our utmost endeavour has won a
few furlongs for those who come after.
Yet to abandon the pursuit of our ideals, to leave our
camp no nearer to them than we found it ; to busy our
selves merely with making our present position as habit-
c

34 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
able and comfortable as possible, because we pride
ourselves on being too practical to leave tasks that we
can achieve, and spend time and strength on efforts to
attain the unattainable ; surely to live like that is to
suffer the supreme defeat. Better far have no city, no
resting-place with comforts and amenities. Even if we
advance only one stage further, we are here as road-
makers ; to construct the way towards perfection. We
are not meant to settle down, contented with things as
they are. As Emerson finely expresses it, " We are en
camped in Nature, not domesticated in it " ; and our own
real home, where satisfaction is to be found, is in that
far-off ideal towards which we must either march steadily
or else " miss the mark."
But nothing is harder to bear in mind ; no habit so
difficult to acquire. How almost irresistible is the temp
tation to take up the tasks we can accomplish, even
though we know them to be small, and to leave the great
things unattempted, because, though we recognise their
grandeur, we see no chance of achieving them. Never
theless that is the supreme temptation, and to succumb,
the supreme disaster. It means to abandon the loftier
things of life and fall back on its easy and lower lines.
A truly great life need not be lived in doing what the
world classes as great and important things. "The
trivial round, the common task " are all that we need in
the way of opportunity. For whatsoever things are true,
honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, that is to
say, the really grand and glorious things of life, are
within the reach of the cottager and his wife quite as
much as of the prince or savant of European reputation.
But this truly great life, which is open to all, can only be
lived by those who make it their real endeavour. " High
living " is indeed the result not of " high-falutin " but of
plain and simple thought. And the plain and simple

FORMATION OF A RIGHT TEMPER 35
truth about ourselves is that only the informing, perfect
ing influence of great ideals can save us. Nothing else
can prevent our moral energy from either degenerating
into egotism and fussiness ; or dying down into the in
dolence of one who has proved to his own satisfaction
that all endeavour after perfection is vanity.
" This is the curse of life, that not
A calmer, wiser frame
Of nobler thoughts and feelings blot
Our passions from our brain ;
But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will."
So Matthew Arnold sings, and little as we may like his
words, we cannot dismiss them as mere shallow or un
founded pessimism. The experience on which they rest
is too commonplace to be denied. One thing however
there is, and one thing only, which delivers the soul from
this gradual choking ; it is the habitual pursuit of high
ideals. The pathway of safety lies in a stubborn refusal
to let them slip, in a determination to see the essential
greatness of the details which make up our daily life, to
regard them as the rough ore out of which we may smelt,
if we will, the pure gold of true perfection.
This controlling, informing idealism is the only " royal
road " for us, as it was also for Our Blessed Lord. It
was " the joy that was set before Him," the certainty and
splendour of His magnificent Ideal, that enabled Him to
"endure the Cross and despise the shame." It was
because He was the great and absolute Idealist that He
was, and must abide to the end, the great practical power
in men and women for their daily life. He asked for no
grand place or stage on which to play His part. Thirty

36 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
years in a village as its carpenter ; then three more as a
poor itinerant preacher and healer in a province as small
as Wales and as remote as Sutherlandshire. But He
has changed the world for us all, by showing us what
life, our common human life, with all that it touches and
all that touches it, means to the Perfect Idealist. In
every babe He saw a glorious being whose guardian is an
angel, living in unveiled communion with God. In the
wild flowers of Palestine He saw a glory, directly given
them by God, greater than any which even a Solomon
could attain. In the blindness of a wayside beggar He
saw a void left as it were, and not by chance, for the
glory of God to fill. And even in the awful details of
His Passion, in the breaking of His Body and the shed
ding of His Blood, He saw events and acts for which
His whole soul gave thanks to God, in a eucharist which
is still the supreme joy of His Church.
Ideals are the one true, great, and abiding practical
force and influence. Cleverness, skill, statesmanship, ac
complishment, scholarship, knowledge, depend upon the
power of idealism for enduring vitality and fruitful-
ness. We may not — indeed we shall not — be able to
describe in detail the content of our ideals, nor to map
out and set up finger-posts all along the upward way
that leads to their realisation. But even so, to desire —
constantly, truly, seriously — what is perfectly good, even
if we do not quite know what it is, or how to achieve it,
makes us practical people ; because so we become part of
the Divine power against evil and all that is opposed to
perfection. While to cease to cherish and order out
goings by ideals, is to be weak and weaker; to leave the
skirts of light unwidened, the area of darkness un-
narrowed. It is, I venture to think, necessary to set
this forth; because, until the place of the pursuit of
ideals in practical, everyday life is better understood, we

FORMATION OF A RIGHT TEMPER 37
proclaim in vain the ideals of Christianity. But for
valid and obvious reasons, this is specially true of the
idea and ideal of Christian unity. It is so stinging a
rebuke to our present condition. It is so far off. The
way to it is tangled and thorny, as well as very long.
And, above all, its content is so unknown. The modifica
tions, even perhaps the revolutions, of our existing ideas
and customs which unity may involve are unthinkable.
We can draw no picture of what it will be like to dwell
together in unity. And each year makes it more difficult
to grasp this conception even in faint outline. There
is a certain solidarity about the European family of
nations, a community of culture, traditions, and, to no
small extent, of racial characteristics. Consequently
unity in religious fellowship for us Europeans was not
altogether unimaginable. One could dream a dream of
what it would be like. But a unity which must embrace
Africa and Asia ; that shall include Japan, China, India ;
uniting Malayans, Bantus, and negroes with the men of
New York, as well as those of Paris, Rome, Petersburg,
Berlin, London, what will that be like, and how can we
attain or even hope to attain to it ? What diversities of
uses, polities, hours, services, ritual, vestments, systems of
discipline, proportions of faith, grades and functions and
trainings of ministers, methods of finance, education,
jurisdiction and the like, we must learn to contemplate,
sympathise with, understand, and welcome. As the old
Church of St. Paul's in London in the seventh century
differed from St. Paul's of to-day, having nothing in
common with it at all but the Creeds, the sacraments,
and the ministry, so different will be the Church in
North Borneo from the Church in Eaton Square. Think
of the trifles which disturb and even drive us from one
another to-day. Candles ; a vestment of white or colour,
cut this way or that ; plain-song or Anglican chanting ;

38 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
incense and portable lights ; a ring in marriage ; the sign
of the Cross in baptism ; and a hundred like matters,
attacked and clung to, denounced and championed, as
matters of " catholic " or " evangelical " principle, for
which we must be ready to be at least second-class misde
meanants. No wonder if for us there are difficulties in the
way of our even desiring unity. No wonder that it is in
our eyes the most nebulous and unattainable of Christian
ideals. Yet in spite of that (or because of that, perhaps,
who can tell ?) the pursuit of it as an actual and sus
tained effort on our part, is the most pressing and
practically valuable task to which we can devote our
energies. But as the prevision of the beauty, healthiness, and
liberty of union one with another dawns upon us, the
right temper is formed. The horizon is no longer so
narrowly bounded. We no longer think of what we can
achieve. A larger view of the solidarity of all rightly
directed human effort comes to cheer us, and we know
that what we cannot effect will most certainly be effected,
and in part by us.
But if we turn from that most sure future to the
present, we who have caught a glimpse of unity get
another powerful motive to cultivate this right temper.
For the present position is full of anxiety. We seem
almost to have come to a standstill in Christian work
in England. We are puzzled and bewildered at the
check. With half, or more than half, England openly
indifferent to Christianity of any kind, we seem to be
making no headway. We know that "the Word of
God is not bound," because nothing can bind it. But
we seem as if we were bound. We are conscious of fetters
and restraints. We speak the words, but with what com
paratively little power. And we are all asking, Why this
failure ? Being practical people, we think of organisations

FORMATION OF A RIGHT TEMPER 39
and constitutions ; a more numerous and better trained
clergy ; a finance scheme which will rouse interest and
quicken the sense of individual responsibility. But the
chief hindrance is disunion. We have forgotten the true
ideal and abandoned the pursuit of it. To be genuinely
practical we must take it up again, and in proportion as
we approach one another we shall win England for God.
We have seen looked at some of the primary results
of our disunion, and how it disqualifies us to witness
to the truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus. Let us
now look at some of its secondary results, and see how
they hinder us in our actual practical work and render
futile to a large extent even those limited activities
which disunion permits us.

CHAPTER V
SOME SECONDARY RESULTS OF OUR DISUNION
IN CHURCH WORK AT HOME
An inquiry into the price we pay for our want of
unity is surely very opportune just now. For, beginning
at home, the need of unity was never so urgent as it
is at present. Cannot the religious world read the
signs of the times and see that it must close up its
ranks, because only so can we hope to resist the awful
array of powers that stand up and threaten all religion
with extinction ? It is true that at present there is
not much of open menace or bitter hostility to religion
in England. Our generation is not likely to see here
anything comparable with what France witnessed a few
years ago. A Cabinet definitely and domineeringly anti-
religious rather than anti-clerical, like that of M. Combes,
is not within sight at present.
But religion is not in grave danger only when
threatened by direct persecution. Indeed the proscribed
Church is probably the safest. The moment of acutest
danger for religion is when its claims are not resisted so
much as ignored : and in England something like that
now obtains. Without any hostility to religion, with a
marked reaction among thinkers from materialism and
such crude philosophies as Determinism, and in the face
of a great revival of both ecclesiastical and religious
activities, there is in every class an unmistakable aloof
ness from the outward expression of religion, and a
40*

SECONDARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 41
corresponding looseness of adhesion to any religious body
or denomination.
This is not at present due to any rejection of or
objection to the idea of the spiritual. Talk quietly and
individually to these men and women who will not come
to church, or take personal part and interest in any
religious work or activity, and you do not find yourself
dealing with unbelievers in God or prayer, or the reality
of spiritual forces and influences. But what you do find
is a person who has no firm foundation or fixed principles
on which to build up a religious and devout life. " One
way is as good as another, my way as yours," that is the
attitude. There is no longer any belief that God has
spoken and declared a way of salvation, with such and
such means of grace which are to be used, and such
and such habits of life which are to be cultivated and
achieved. In a word we are face to face with a subtle
kind of agnosticism. This is the root of what is deplored
as " indifferentism." Men have become indifferent
because they have grown to despair of finding out what
God has revealed. And this is the result of our disunion,
which supplies the Serpent's opportunity to inquire with
more ironical force than ever, " Yea, hath God said ? "
And if this is met by the conventional reply that God has
spoken and that His Way is proclaimed by this or that
Church, there comes the numbing thought that it cannot
be possible to pick out from all the equally confident,
Biblical detailed systems and schemes, that one which is
true or truth. And what is the plain man to say, and
how can he decide ? He is not hostile to religion if only
he could find it. He is already convinced that you
cannot express either him, or the world in which he lives,
in terms of matter. He has no wish to dispute the
existence of the spiritual factors in his environment,
including a Personal God Who will hear prayer. But

42 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
apparently no one can interpret those spiritualities to
him. The religious world shows itself to him rather
like a great street in one of the poorer parts of London
on a Saturday night. It is brilliantly lit, but the light
is artificial, and it is full of the noise of men each
shouting the superiority of his wares. The air is
ringing with rival cries : " This way for the real thing."
Everywhere is placarded, " None genuine unless signed,
' Pius X,' ' Evangelical,' ' Catholic' " The really hungry
and the not over-sensitive may buy ; and no doubt get
in part what they want. For, with whatever drawbacks
or admixtures, there is real food-stuff probably in every
stall. But the sensitive and refined, and those who feel no
particular religious or spiritual hunger, do not go near that
street. It has, or they think it has, nothing they want ;
and much that they find boring and positively distaste
ful. Above all they do not connect it with their idea
of things spiritual ; all its salient characteristics are
opposed to that. They are confused, not guided ; jarred,
not uplifted. Gradually they have come to feel that it
is a matter of indifference whether you are guided or
not by religion ; whether you have seven sacraments, like
the Romans, or none, like the Quakers ; and it is far less
trouble and perhaps more modest to have none. There
fore they do not go to church. For if things like
Baptism and Holy Communion do not matter, mere
church-going cannot be very important. Unless, then, it
is quite convenient and neither too fine nor too wet, and
the sermon sure to be good, and the service short, and the
music excellent, one can stay away and no harm done.
And that things like Baptism and Holy Communion do
not really matter is plain ; because thousands of good
and devout Christians set no store by them. The un-
baptized go to the Lord's Supper; the baptized stay
away ; and a very large number of Christians take no

SECONDARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 43
notice of either. All ordinances and means of grace are
in like manner things one can do without ; and so there
steals over a whole society a kind of weariness and dis
taste for the entire subject. The sense of worship is
starved ; loyal adhesion to any religious body, with
an active part in its life and concerns, is almost old-
fashioned ; and the progress of Christianity in national
life is checked.
But not only do our disunions breed confusion in
this way. They, and what springs from them, also shock
and lower men's moral sense and respect for religion.
Among the poorer classes religion as expressed by re
ligious bodies has largely ceased to be reverenced.
The various "Churches" at all events appear to be
touting for custom, like competing traders. At least
they seem, in the judgment of those among whom they
work, to be acting like rival shows, trying to popularise
their methods, " to go one better " than their neighbours
in the way of advertisement, or by giving better treats
and prizes, more teas and blankets, more lavish relief with
less inquiry and wise austerity. The more self-respecting
of the working classes stand aloof for this very reason.
The less self-respecting make use of the religious organi
sations. But both alike have little or no respect for
these eager aspirants for their custom and patronage.
To attend a place of worship habitually does not create
any obligation on the worshipper to support loyally that,
denomination. The obligation is conceived to be on the
other side. You have given your custom or patronage
or extended your support at the request of the minister
or the " lady," who called and asked you to do so. And
now that you want something, it is the turn of the
religious body to show itself grateful, or at least to make
some recognition of what you have done for it. Few
more deadly blows can be struck at religion than this.

44 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
It is like a severe body-blow just over the heart. For
the heart of a man's religion must ever be his feeling that
it is something immeasurably superior to himself, to be
looked up to and held in reverence. Yet I do not for one
moment believe that anyone who knows the actual con
ditions of English life in this matter will say that I
exaggerate. In large centres of population, in country
towns, or even in some villages where both the Church
and Nonconformity, or Roman and Protestant, are
making great simultaneous efforts to draw together a
larger following, this result is almost inevitable, and is
everywhere seen. So universal is the habit of acting on
such lines, that it is done unconsciously and without in
tent, which only makes it the more deadly. If the clergy
or their workers on the one hand, and the Nonconformist
ministers with their workers on the other, were to sit
down and say, " How can we ' dish ' the Church ; or ' the
Chapel ' ? They are offering so much to their mothers'
meeting or their Sunday-school children, what can we
offer ? " the system would die of shame sooner or later.
But there are no such consultations or intentional cam
paigns of bribery. Rather it is in the air that we must
advertise ourselves largely and attractively, must make
our organisations popular, that if you do not have good
prizes or expensive treats " it is no good trying to run
the show,'1 and so, decently veiled, the vulgarising of the
sacred, and the appearance of a touting rivalry, drags
religion down.
That this very serious evil has been imported into
religious work only by disunion is unquestioned. Nothing
of the sort would have been thought of, or possible,
had religious unity existed. But disunion, the vaunted
" competition of the Churches," has lifted the floodgate
and let in this full tide of vulgarity, and advertisement,
and self-assertion, together with the even more repulsive

SECONDARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 45
methods of a half-unconscious rivalry. How far we have
fallen (I say " we " deliberately, for I know of no re
ligious body that has quite escaped the contagion), is
shown by the fact that we have permitted parents with
many children to send some to this and others to that
denomination ; so that they might claim the loaves and
fishes of several of the " Churches." Such things have
been done and we held our tongues, careless of the harm
at which we were conniving by our silence : harm, not to
the individual only but to the religious sense of the
whole community. For be it remembered we deal with
a shrewd race who reckon acutely and speak plainly, and
what we choose to ignore and be silent about is very well
known, commented on, and understood by them. How
could the dignity of religion be more completely and
effectually lowered, or more harm done ?
Let me repeat, I do not mean that all over England
Churches and Chapels have deliberately and consciously
set to work to cut each other out. To a very large
extent the rivalry and its tendency to win adherents by
bribery have worked unconsciously. It has been generally
felt and taken fdr granted that this sort of thing is
necessary, that you must proceed on such lines, and that
popularity was something to be aimed at by direct offers
of a tempting kind. It is indeed less a deliberate
policy and more the inevitable outcome of the existence
side by side of competing organisations.
But it would be an error to think that the moral
harm done by religious disunion and rivalry is only felt
in this direction and by the classes which look for alms
and relief. It has been not much less marked and un
happy in social circles where no idea of relief is ever
entertained. Very much in the tone and atmosphere of
religious controversy is distasteful to the moral sense of
many a man of the world. A great deal that appears

46 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
week by week in the " Religious Press," not only in the
letters of correspondents but also in " leaders " and
editorial parts of the papers, will often " sicken " a fair-
minded man. Trained in and saturated by the spirit
and chivalry of sport, he is accustomed to giving the
other side every chance ; to claim nothing that cannot be
fairly claimed ; to yield, not to snatch, the benefit of the
doubt. If he wins he does not exult ; if he loses he does
not whine or rail, and he will be very slow and loath to
impute motives or to interpret every mistake of the
other side to malice prepense. To a man so trained, and
there are, thank God, thousands of this sort in England,
far too much of the tone, substance, and method of re
ligious controversy seems distinctly " low." Its acrimony,
its reckless imputation of motive, its whining and railing
in defeat, its unchivalrous exultation in victory, the
absence of all apparent desire to be fair, these things and
their likes seem to him to be " low down," and " very
poor form." There are indeed days when The Sportsman
is probably more wholesome reading than a good many
of the religious " Weeklies." The tips from the " Sport
ing Prophet " and " The Latest from the Stables " will be
less spiritually harmful than the bitter, uncharitable
leading article or the sneering sarcasm of some exponent
of the real truth of Christ. Men of the world are often
disgusted, and young fellows still capable of enthusiasm
have their ideas of religion jarred by the direct results
of our disunion, I mean our methods in controversy and
especially our " Religious Press."
It may be said that our young men of the kind described
do not often read religious newspapers. But they are the
sons, brothers, friends, and school-fellows of those who
do and they know the tone. They know also the kind
of man whom religious controversy produces, and who in
turn produces religious controversy. It may be that the

SECONDARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 47
parson in Miss Cholmondeley's Red Pottage is a little
unfair if presented as a type. But there is too much of
that sort in a calling which ought to be absolutely free
from anything of the kind. The idea is abroad that
there is not quite the same sense of chivalry and fair
play among ministers of religion as there ought to be,
and there is reason to believe that the methods of religious
controversy and the spirit which gives rise to those
methods, are largely to blame for this, than which nothing
could be more disastrous.
It is in such considerations of the extent to which the
dignity and prestige of religion are lowered by a disunited
Christendom that we shall find the main cause of that
weariness and indifference to organised religion and that
avoidance of loyal adhesion to any religious body, which
mark our age. Our special characteristic in connection
with these matters is that we have more inclination to
believe in the spiritual, and more reverence and regard
for spiritual things and persons than any previous age
since the Renaissance. But all this is combined with
something between contempt and impatience for religious
bodies and organisations. A great change has come over
thinking England. Science is no longer trying to prevent
men from being believers and whole-heartedly religious.
On the contrary science is on the whole favourable to the
reality of the spiritual, to an extent which thirty or forty
years ago would have seemed impossible, but we cannot
take advantage of our opportunity by reason of our
disunion. As for other hindrances such as Bridge and
motor-cars, the increase of wealth and luxury, " the week
end habit," and so forth : these can but be contributory
causes. They can only enter into and capture a human
soul after some more potent devil has broken down the
main defence. And it is the contempt into which religion
has been dragged by what are sometimes called in uncon-

48 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
scious irony " religionists," that weakens the force with
which our holy faith would otherwise appeal to men,
tending to make them ready to turn to other things.
And this must be added. The soul that shuns or
evades all public and corporate expression of religious
conviction is in great danger. With human qualities,
as with all else in nature, the continuance of life depends
upon finding their free and natural expression. The
plant must put out its leaves, and the lover must say and
do the tender loving things, or the plant and the love
will wither and die. And so with the religious sense.
Its natural and proper expression is in corporate acts of
worship and devotion of life, where each feels the uplift
of the faith of all the others, and in turn contributes
his quota to the whole. Religious convictions cannot
naturally or properly express themselves only in furtive
acts, or in isolation, still less in a rather " superior "
criticism of religious bodies. And therefore anything
which prevents men from associating themselves with
others in religious worship and work strikes at the very
root even of individual religion. The evil may be working
out of sight, far below the surface ; and men may be
quite unconscious of what is happening to them. But
the mischief is not less, it is much more potent on that
account ; and it is here and thus that our quarrels and
disunion have one of their worst outward effects. They
cause men in whom the religious instinct is by no means
dead to turn away from the common life of those who
value religion, from participation in its work, and even
from thorough conformity with its worship. In such
circumstances, slowly but surely personal religion must be
dying down. It may be that for a generation or two an
inherited tradition, in part social or even political, or a
momentum from the example of parents may cause a
considerable number of separate individuals to be more

SECONDARY RESULTS OF DISUNION 49
or less interested in some kind of Church work and in
spiritual things, and to have a sincere if undeveloped
respect for religion. But all the time their religious sense
is growing weaker. Above all, they have nothing to
teach their children. They set no infectious example of
devotion. To their children's eyes neither their money
nor their time is at the disposal of God's cause. They
have no assured message to deliver : no burning and
shining light to hand on ; not much more than a straight
moral tone, with rather a critical and certainly a cool
and detached attitude towards all forms of faith. In the
long run nothing but the revival of a Creed lived out in
the fellowship of a human society gathered round Our
Lord will secure the continuance in our midst of religious
individuals. It is this which our disunion is preventing, and herein
lies the causa causans of that check to the progress of
Christianity in England which every denomination is
feeling. And so we stand in sore peril of losing the very
finest chance that Christianity has ever had of winning a
nation for Christ. It is the direct result of our disunion,
with its confusions, its rivalries, its controversies. And
nothing but improvement and reform in this direction
will enable us to go forward conquering and to conquer.

CHAPTER VI
THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM IN ITS EFFECT
ON THE EXTENSION OF THE KINGDOM
So far in considering some of the evils which spring
directly from our condition of disunion, we have con
fined our attention to those which take effect in so-called
Christian countries and communities. The Church, how
ever, has another field of work of equal importance, in
that she is called to evangelise the heathen and non-
Christian world. It needs no lengthy analysis to make it
plain that disunion is as disastrous in regard to this
work of extension as it is in regard to the intensive work.
But it may be doubted whether we realise sufficiently
how disastrous it is.
In the first place there is what leaps to the eye, the
confusion produced in some non-Christian country when
our holy faith is presented to the people by let us say
both Moravian and Roman Catholic missionaries. The
contents of the faith, the externals of worship and organ
isation, and not least but greatest, the mutual attitude
of the two Christian bodies, must constitute the very
gravest obstacle to the triumph of the Cross. If we had
to devise a method by which we could best impede
the propaganda of any body of truth, we could not
hit on anything more effective than this. Here is a fact
which might tell us who is the real author of our divisions.
Short of not preaching Christ at all to the non-Christian
world, to preach Him thus is the best way that can
60

THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 51
be imagined to make the preaching ineffectual. I know
full well that out " at the front," and in face of the
common foe, animosities" die down and an approach to
comradeship or something very like it replaces the an
tagonism of Christendom. But directly the converts
get beyond the elementary stages of Christian knowledge,
they are apt to discover that what they consider and
hold to be Christianity, is regarded very differently not
only by compatriot converts, but by those to whom
they must look up, European missionaries. What chance
then are we offering these new worlds which we are
trying to win for Christ ? How can we dare to proceed
on lines which we know must cause it to be infinitely
difficult for the work of preaching Christ to have stable
and fruitful results? We are making it as hard as
we possibly can, that such a thing as a native Christianity
shall arise in countries like China, India, or Japan. We
are transplanting into these lands our own hateful
divisions; and inflicting on them the very weaknesses
which we have seen are so disastrous to ourselves.
But we must not forget that what is hurtful among
us may easily do far more harm among them. For these
new Christian communities must go on for many a genera
tion yet in the midst of a still unconverted population.
And how can we hope that they will be able either to
finish the work of evangelisation, or even to hold their
own against possible outbreaks of persecution, unless they
stand together for mutual support ?
There is indeed a bare possibility that healing for us may
come from them. Their theological differences will not
be embittered by generations of mutual persecution, and
savage intolerance. They may be able, if no importation
of a European animus exacerbates their divergence, to
look at and into the points of divergence calmly and
charitably; while a necessity for unity so urgent and

52 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
patent may almost force them to arrive at terms of
peace. So England in the early days of her Christi
anity composed the quarrels between the Celtic and the
Roman schools of thought and practice, and saw the
rise of a Church coterminous with the nation. But in
the seventh century in England there were no outside
influences of great prestige to advise each party to
stand its ground and die sooner than compromise the
faith. Who can say what would have happened in this
country if the enormous influence of Continental Christi
anity on the one hand, and the almost equal influence
of the parent houses in Scotland and Ireland on the
other, had backed the disputants on either side and
made vital the questions of the tonsure, the date of
Easter, and the form of Baptism ? But in the providence
of God at that critical time we had no such trial to
go through. Indeed the gift of Theodore to us was
potent in the direction of peace and unity. But have
we reason to think that we might count on the same
absence of disturbing elements if fifty or a hundred years
hence Japan or India or China should wish to have
a united and national Christianity ? Rather would not
all the power and influence of the parent bodies, the
Roman, Anglican, Protestant missionary societies be
thrown into maintaining in the Far East, or the heart of
Africa, those differences which they maintain at home?
We may be sure that it will, unless some great change
come over the spirit of Western Christianity in the
course of the next half-century or so. At present can
anyone believe that those great missionaries, the Jesuit
Fathers, would be content to see their spiritual children
settle down into a native Christian Church which does
not acknowledge the Vatican and omits from its creed
and practices the special beliefs and "cultes" which are
necessary to salvation in ultramontane minds ? Can any-

THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 53
one believe that the Baptist fathers and responsible heads
of the China Inland Mission will stand by and see their
converts and Christian communities adopt a sacerdotal
ism and a sacramentalism, which they regard as sheer cor
ruptions of the Faith of Christ? No, in our present
condition not only can we not help, we are bound to
hinder, the development of Christianity in lands which
we are doing much to bring to Christ. Nothing can
fit and enable us to do our right part towards the newly
Christianised peoples, except the recovery of our peace
and fellowship with one another at home. We may
perhaps hear this call from Christ's little ones when we
can hear no other. It may perhaps be, in the mercy
of God, that the blessing we shall obtain for work done,
money and our best sons given, for the extension of
His Kingdom and Grace to foreign nations, will be the
restoration of our unity, and that such an event as
the Edinburgh Conference is only the first faint dawn
of a new day. But we dare not trust that such a
blessing will be forced on us. Rather at the first sign
of its approach we must grasp it as a present blessing,
which is given us to cultivate now. And it is indeed
right that we should think of those lands which are
beginning to turn to the Saviour. We ought to try and
forecast what will be in (say) fifty or a hundred years
their condition and their needs which we alone can supply ;
so that we may the more earnestly pray and work for
mutual peace and love, lest we fail them in their hour of
need. If we have any of the chivalry of Christ, any re
membrance of His solemn warning as to the sin of causing
His little ones to stumble, this plea from the ends of the
earth will rouse us to action. For their sakes we may
sanctify ourselves in oneness of life and love, that they
may be one with us as we shall have learnt to be in
Him.

54 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
Meanwhile there is yet another wrong we inflict by our
divisions on the non-Christian world. We lessen incal
culably the power with which we present the Gospel to
them ; and that not only by our confusing, conflicting
appeal and presentment of Christian truth ; but far more
in decreasing the quantity and lowering the quality of
our missionaries.
In almost every part of the world the number of those
engaged in the work is insufficient. Why are there so
few ? It is because the appeal to men to leave home and
kindred comes with such comparatively little force into
such comparatively unprepared souls. The voice that
calls lacks power and authority because it is the voice of
only a small Christian body, or it may be even only a
section of that body. Were all Christians united, the
force of the appeal would be amazingly increased. For
the smaller, the less august and considerable the com
munity which calls, the less potent must be the call. The
English Church exemplifies this very painfully. In pro
portion to its wealth, numbers, and its special responsibili
ties for great sections of the overseas work, it lags far, far
behind in this matter. Its missions are few, very ill-
supported in money, and constantly and chronicly deficient
in the number of workers. It is not infrequently com
pelled to abandon posts, or to leave great fields unoccu
pied for want of men and women, even more than for
lack of funds. Compared with either Roman or Pro
testant bodies, the work it is doing is painfully small.
The true cause of this failure (who can really doubt it ?)
is that we do it sectionally, not as a body at all. The
Church of England does no work abroad, either among
non- Christians or among our own countrymen overseas.
All work of this sort which is done by Anglicans is done
by private societies. The appeal which reaches our
young men and women to go abroad has none of the im-

THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 55
pressiveness of the appeal of the whole body of the
English Church speaking in the name of her Master. It
is the appeal of a comparatively small section of indi
viduals, almost sometimes the appeal of a party, of the
High Church or the Low Church society ; or of a Univer
sity, or of some quite indefinite group of people who
have taken up — all honour to them — some particular
diocese or province of the great vineyard. Considering
our method of setting to work the response is surprising.
But how much grander, fuller, and stronger it would be if
instead of these disunited, fragmentary, sectional appeals,
our branch of the Church in majestic unity called upon
her sons and daughters to offer themselves and their sub
stance for the extension of the Kingdom of God ? But
we cannot do this because we are so divided. The S.P.G.
and the C.M.S. could not amalgamate at present. And
so far and so deep has gone this habit of sectional and
divided effort and appeal, that there are actually those
who believe that this is the best way ! They will plead
that this wasteful, extravagant result of our disunion has
advantages, which we should be unwise to part with. It
may indeed be true that for a few years there would be
some drop in income ; and it is certainly true that the
change of system would be most difficult to initiate.
To overcome ancient habits, to set aside large vested
interests, to get permanent officials to see with new
eyes and think in new ways, are all but impossible tasks ;
and there would be grief and resistance and friction, and
the work abroad would suffer for, it may be, a decade.
So that the wisest practical decision is certainly that we
are not yet ripe for such a step, which must come rather
as a result of drawing closer to one another than as a
preparation for it. But it is crass to deny that our
feebleness in the work overseas and our constant lack of
men and money for this work are to a great extent the

56 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
disabling results of the sin of disunion and would largely
disappear if we were united.
But what is true of us considered as a section apart is
even more true of Christendom as a whole. With what
majesty and power would not a united Christendom call
for volunteers for the front ? If only we could cause that
voice to be heard instead of the mere denominational
appeals which are now made, the difficulty of finding
enough workers would be at an end.
For not only would the call be so much more impressive
in itself. It would fall on hearts so much more prepared
to listen and obey. The atmosphere of Christendom at
present is charged with the dust and heat of controversy,
and is not congenial to the growth of that all-embracing
love and compassion which are the spring and motive of
all missions to teach men to know God ; as they were the
motive of the Incarnation itself. Failure to care for
those whose religion is different from ours, and slowness
to feel the claims of distant and unknown races, are
natural to man ; and nothing will overcome them but
the development in us of that Love which transcends
all natural love. It is Love's fire burning freely in the
heart that alone makes true missionaries and sends men
and women abroad to give their lives for those whom
they know not. But a divided, controversial Christendom
is not the place in which such Love develops widely and
generally. That it develops at all is due to a gracious
influence overcoming in certain souls the ungracious
influence of our quarrels and divisions. To be brought
up to believe, above all if the belief is tacitly assumed
without argument, that the religious opinions of a
large number of Christians justify their exclusion from
civil rights, or are a barrier to social intercourse, or a
badge of moral inferiority, or make it seemly to deprive
them of their property, or cast grave doubts on their

THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 57
attaining the heavenly life — to be brought up like that
is to breathe an atmosphere in which divine Love grows
with great difficulty. Even if we are taught to be
enthusiastic about our own section of Christendom we
are not necessarily bettered. We must not forget that
the Pharisees were intense enthusiasts and untiring mis
sionaries. But they had no tenderness for sinners, no
sympathy with ignorance. It was not from love of
neighbour that they worked, but to secure the triumph
of their own views. There is a kind of egoism which in
certain conditions will spare itself nothing in trying
to get others to agree with it. Society knows such
people very well, and the history of religion is not devoid
of them. Only in this sphere the grandeur of the cause
for which they seem to work sometimes lends them a
halo. When a man who has no love for millions of his
fellow-Christians, his near neighbours and fellow-country
men, allied to him by every natural tie, as well as by
belief in the same Master, turns with enthusiasm to the
poor heathen, is it very uncharitable to wonder in what
spirit he is going ? True, there comes a time when even
a St. Paul is driven to exclaim, " Behold, we turn to the
Gentiles." But how hard he tried first to win his
brethren : how all through life he longed and prayed
that they might be brought unto the fold : how he goes
on loving them in spite of their treatment of him and
to the end considers their prejudices and conforms in every
lawful way to their ideas. He shaved his head with the
men who had a vow ; circumcised Timothy because he was
half Jewish; and never forgot their point of view.
Though he was the Apostle of the Gentiles he never
ceased to love the Jews. " To the Jews first and after
wards to the Gentiles " was his practice, right up to the
time when we take leave of him in Rome.
This analogy is far from perfect. But it cannot be

58 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
doubted that a true, deep love for our fellow-Christians
is the best possible preparation for foreign mission work ;
and that our disunion and deep, obstinate quarrellings
tend to make that preparation more difficult and very in
complete at best. Surely here again we may apply the
Divine principle and ask, " If a man love not his brother
whom he has seen, how can he love his brother whom he
has not seen ? " It is not only therefore the quantity,
it is also the quality of our work abroad that suffers from
our lack of unity and brotherly love. We send fewer,
and those less well equipped, than we should if we were
united ; and thereby inflict upon the non-Christian world
a doubly grievous wrong.
We are then face to face with a gigantic evil when
we look at a disunited Christendom. At home and
abroad we are powerless when we might be so strong.
We cannot teach childhood, guide youth, chasten and
control manhood. We cannot get rid of slums, influence
legislation, inspire democracy. We cannot edify, often
we cannot even keep the souls we possess ; we cannot win
the souls whom we are elect that we may win. We lend
to politicians for them to use in their partisan struggles,
names, influences, prestiges which angels reverence ; be
cause we know not in our narrowness and hardness how
to use these things ourselves.
To labour therefore for the restoration of unity is not a
task to which a Christian man may well give himself. It
is a primary duty — (should I exaggerate if I said the
primary duty?) — of every Christian. The label matters
nothing, Quaker, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Anglican,
Free Churchman, " Catholic " — all alike labour under the
same paralysing, benumbing disability. To get rid of it,
the daily prayer and the conscious effort of every kind
and sort of Christian ought to be directed. But so con
fused are our ideas and thoughts on the subject ; so little

THE DISUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 59
has the mind of Christians studied it, that if we would
work usefully we must begin at the beginning and
examine the whole question of disunion, and the con
ditions under which we may hope to see it disappear.
Primary facts and truths need to be stated, and some de
tachment from the actual controversy first secured. This
may tend to bring us into such a temper of mind and
to supply us with such general principles, that we may
safely and usefully descend into the arena. Then also we
may consider some at least of the actual disputes now
going on and what steps, if any, can be taken with a
hope of bringing about, not immediate peace, but the
start of an approach towards it.

CHAPTER VII
OUR DIFFERENCES. HOW SHALL WE PROCEED ?
We ought now to be in the proper frame of mind in
which to approach and discuss the differences between the
Church and Nonconformity. We have furnished ourselves
with a motive for dealing resolutely with them by seeing,
at least in part, how grievously they hinder both the
glorifying of God and the salvation of men. We also
regard them as springing from and having the nature
of sin. We are thus supplied not only with the best
motive, but also with the right temper in which to
consider these differences. Approaching them penitently,
we are sure to speak of them meekly and humbly, nor
will they rouse in us storms of resentment. Moreover, if
we be penitent we shall be sincerely desirous of finding a
way of escape. We shall not declare at the first difficulty
or check that the case is hopeless and that nothing can be
done. On the contrary we shall be resourceful in finding
out how positions not open to direct attack may be out
flanked or turned indirectly. For penitence leads to a
vigorous desire for amendment, and if our desire to
promote unity be inspired by penitence, it will not be de
terred by difficulties nor will it be dejected at finding that
at present only a little is possible. A penitent does
not expect to be allowed to do great things to repair his
fault. He is glad if he can do even a little. So we
shall be content to take even one step in the right
direction.

OUR DIFFERENCES 61
But here a note of warning ought to be sounded.
There attaches to this desire a danger great in proportion
to our earnestness. For nothing is easier to people
deeply moved by any strong desire than unreality ; and
nothing could be more fatal to our success. Yet how
often we hear those who are enthusiastic about unity de
claring and seeming to believe that our differences are
small, and that unity can be created immediately by
acting as if we were already united. Such unreality
may produce for a moment a pleasing effect. But un
reality it is, and the results of unreality can never be
good or sound or practical. What indeed we want is
frankly and fearlessly to set forth all our differences.
We need to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth about them. We must be quite as careful
to extenuate nothing as we are to set down nought in
malice. The truth is that between the Church and Noncon
formity there are many real great and grave conflicts of
opinion and belief. To doubt this is to do Nonconformity
a grievous wrong.
There can only be one sufficient justification for any
of those separations from the Church by which Noncon
formity came into being, and that is a conviction in con
science that on some matter or matters of vital importance
the Church is in error. We dishonour those great
bodies of devout Christian people by declaring that
lightly, over points of minor importance, they made
breach after breach in our Christian unity.
Nor does it help the case to plead, as sometimes it is
pleaded, that though the founders of Nonconformity
thought their points were important, their descendants
in a more enlightened age know better. Thus to be
little the founders of Nonconformity is as unhelpful as it
is unbecoming. For if it be true that those men were

62 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
wrong in regarding the points for which they left the
Church as grave and vital, then plainly it is the duty of
their descendants, having discovered this error, to say so
and retrace their steps. For a man to say, " I know that
my grandfather quarrelled with yours on a most trivial
matter, but though I own that the cause was quite in
adequate, I mean to maintain the quarrel and the separa
tion " — for a man to say that would be unchristian and
unmoral as well as undignified and illogical.
No, we must take it as certainly true that between
the Church and Nonconformity there is a real difference,
great enough, weighty enough, to account for the past.
It is not even true to say that on all fundamental and
important issues we are agreed, and that the points on
which we differ are secondary if not negligible. Some of
the points on which apparently we differ are anything
but small or secondary, as we shall see, and though it may
be granted for the sake of argument that our agreements
are on more weighty matters and cover more ground than
our points of dispute, yet that does not help us practi
cally if the points in actual dispute are grave and solemn.
If you have to cross a river which you can neither swim
nor wade, stepping-stones to take you half-way are of no
practical use if the rest of the way is impassable.
No, the true value of our agreeing in so much of
supreme importance, is that it should supply us with
ground for hope as to the future and with a place of
peace to which even now we may resort frequently, so
that in the spirit of peace we may deal with our dis
agreements. But we are not entitled to say that because
in much we are already one, we can afford to ignore the
truths over which we are at opposite poles.
Similarly the fact that many now on both sides earnestly
desire peace and feel no ill-will or enmity is a factor of
the greatest magnitude. In the end it will dominate the

OUR DIFFERENCES 63
position, because it is in accordance with God's will. But
it is the presage of the final victory, not the victory
itself. It enables us to open the campaign and take our
first humble steps with confidence. But to open a cam
paign is not to end one, and this will be a long, long
fight. Just at present and for many a year to come
words of sober prayer for watchfulness and perseverance
for the " power of love and of a sound mind " are much
more appropriate than any strain of triumph.
Let us then put aside resolutely the cognate ideas
that the differences between the Church and Noncon
formity are small or obsolete; and also the idea that we
are already within hail of victory. God's aims are never
easily attained by man, but they are the only aims worthy
of us.
Strong then in our desire for unity, humble and con
trite in temper, let us try to measure accurately, fully,
and with all the science we possess, the distance which
separates us. We shall find a host of differences to in
vestigate. We must see what they are, what they spring
from and amount to, and prepare the way for a true
reconciliation. Let me say at once, however, that it is
not my intention in this book to attempt such a task in
detail : that would require more time and space, to say
nothing of far more knowledge and wisdom than I can
claim. I want merely to look at some characteristic
features, positions, and principles which may give an
indication of what has to be done in this way.
But here an initial difficulty is encountered that
appears almost insuperable. We wish to compare the
doctrine of the Church with that of the Nonconformist
bodies around her. But when we come to ask what
those doctrines are, not in vague outline but in detail
enough for our purpose of comparison, there is no clear
answer. As regards the Church it is not so very hard

64 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
to reply. It is true that if we were asked whether by
the teaching of the Church we meant that of Lord
Halifax or that of the Bishop of Durham, that of Canon
Newbolt or that of Dr. Rashdall, a good "debating
society point" might be scored against us. But it is
only a debater's point. The stars of great brightness
which shoot out from our midst, becoming ever more
brilliant because of the friction occasioned by their
rapid flight, are apt to rivet the attention of all be
holders. But they are not types or specimens of the
very sober-hued mass from which they so conspicuously
emerge. There is a quiet, restrained, steady old volume
called the Prayer Book, with its Creeds, its Articles, its
Sacraments, its Ordinal, and that wherein itself explains
much of what it means, its Catechism ; and this book is
read by the vast majority of Church people in practically
the same sense. There are minor temperamental dif
ferences, and variations in the proportionate value as
signed to various doctrines and practices. These are
often fomented by partisans, sometimes even by inter
ested statesmen and politicians; but in spite of all
appearances to the contrary, there is always a good
working agreement. So that if a man should ask, What
are the doctrines and teaching of the Church of England ?
you would refer him to the Prayer Book, and truly tell
him that an intelligent study of that volume will give him
the best answer. He might perhaps come to you at the
end with questions which, so to speak, Dr. Dearmer would
answer in that plain-song which is so confusing to many
who believe themselves musical ; while others would answer
in " Anglicans." But with all that admitted, the inquirer
would know what the Church of England taught with
sufficient fullness and accuracy. Now to the best of my
knowledge and belief there is nothing at all correspond
ing with our Prayer Book in the Nonconformist bodies.

OUR DIFFERENCES 65
With many of them it is a fundamental tenet that such
an expression of corporate faith, such a lex credendi, lex
orandi, is mischievous or even absolutely wrong. It is
not so much that they see the great dangers which
attach to stereotyping the liturgy and public services,
as that they make each single and separate congregation
the arbiter of its own creed and practices.
Their theory or belief is that the proper meaning of
the words "the Church" is any duly constituted con
gregation of faithful men and women. Each such unit
of people gathered together in Christ's name has Him in
its midst, and can confidently claim the power and
guidance of the Holy Spirit to solve all its problems
whether of faith or practice. For any external authority,
then, to claim or exercise any right of interference or
direction over such a congregation is entirely wrong and
indefensible. This is of course one of the fundamental tenets of
Congregationalism, as its name implies. But it is by no
means confined to this body. The Baptists also hold the
same view, as the following declaration plainly asserts :
"We maintain that each separate church [the context
proves that this is a synonym for " congregation "] has,
within itself, the exclusive right to choose its own pastors
and office-bearers, to receive and exclude its members,
and to manage its own affairs irrespective of all external
control."" That is of course the Congregational ist principle
in its absolute form, and of its many consequences this is
one ; that though these separate " churches " may combine
for certain purposes, such as Foreign Mission work, they
cannot have, nor do they purport or wish to have, any
creed or norm of doctrine. For a creed is a standard of
doctrine to which single congregations, like single persons,
ought to conform. It implies that the real unit of Church
life is something far bigger than any local body or
E

66 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
congregation, and that at all events on such major points
as what constitutes the faith, we must hearken to and
listen for, not the voice of any single town or village
congregation, but to that of the whole body. Now the
first principle, or one of the first principles, of " Indepen
dency," a term which includes both Congregationalists
and Baptists, denies this absolutely. Though each con
gregation .has its creed, probably rather amorphous and
unformulated, the body as a whole is creedless, and can
return no distinct and definite reply to the question,
What is it that you believe ?
There are, it is true, other denominations which do not
stand on this basis. The Wesleyans, or the Methodists,
like the Moravians, are a body and not a congeries of
congregations ; and though they have no formal creed yet
in their catechisms they set forth their belief, and there is
for them an authoritative standard of faith and practice
which, in principle at least, is the same throughout their
entire communion. We could therefore handle the tenets
of such bodies. But here another difficulty suggests itself.
Even supposing that we could examine the tenets of
the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Wesleyans,
we have by no means accomplished our task. The Church
of England is surrounded by a very large number of
Christian bodies. There are the Roman Catholics, the
Presbyterians (i.e. " the Presbyterian Church of England"),
the Society of Friends, Plymouth Brethren, and, though
its position is very hard to understand, we must I suppose
add the body which rather strangely calls itself " the
Catholic Apostolic Church"; to say nothing of such
smaller bodies as the Bible Christians, the Swedenborgians,
and the Christadelphians. There are in fact, as a glance
at any work of reference will show, scores of other deno
minations — "the dissidence of dissent," as they have
been called.

OUR DIFFERENCES 67
Now to consider the doctrines and tenets of all these
in their connection with the Church of England would
demand several volumes and much study of a most
wearisome and — that I be not discourteous, let us say —
not very useful sort. I propose therefore to make no
pretence at covering the whole ground. I must lighten
my load if I am ever to enter port with it ; only I would
beg those whose views and opinions I thus jettison
to believe that it is only the actual necessities of my
position and not any disrespect for them that leads me
to do so, and I will make no further apology for con
fining myself within rather narrow limits in my exami
nation of our differences with Nonconformity. That
Nonconformity is of two kinds, Roman and Protestant.
I propose to consider the latter first, leaving what has
to be said about the former to the end. And since
my desire is to consider the English problem of reunion,
I shall refer only occasionally to Presbyterianism, as
in England it has but a small hold. But more than
this. If only we could arrive at some kind of true
union, or even begin a sincere approach to it, with
the Wesleyans and Independents — i.e. Congregationalists
and Baptists — gravitation would almost do the rest.
The united body would have such weight and attraction
that the smaller ones would fall into it, as by a natural
law. In England we may be sure that there would always
be some who stood aloof — "Seventh Day Adventists"
and the like. But they would be few; and would no
more check the progress of God's Kingdom than the
few people who still believe that the world is flat check
the onward movement of science.

CHAPTER VIII
WHERE SHALL WE START?
The present writer wishes for the sake of his readers,
even more than for his own, that there were some brief,
easy, and succinct way of dealing with the differences
of conviction which separate Nonconformity from the
Church of England. But there is no "short and easy
method " open to us in such a work as this.
I had thought at first that we might do well to go
back to our common starting-point in theology. We
all believe in the Christian doctrine of the Godhead
and in the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The
present writer recalls the fact that some time ago, in
arranging for periodical friendly meetings between the
Church of England clergy and the Nonconformist
ministers of a particular neighbourhood, the question
of the inclusion or exclusion of the Unitarian minister
was raised. And it was the unanimous opinion of the
Nonconformists, shared I need hardly say by us others,
that it would not do to ask him. This decision was
made in no spirit of bigotry, dislike or contempt; the
minister in question was a man of whom all thought
highly ; but it was felt that he would not stand on our
basis; and that his presence would introduce problems
and questions and a cleavage which did not exist for the
rest of us. The Incarnation then is our common ground,
and from it we might start. Soon, very soon, not in
point of time and history but of theology and thought,
68

WHERE SHALL WE START? 69
we divide. Nonconformity, generally speaking, goes off
in one direction, the English Church in another. The
Church of England holds, for instance, that the Incarna
tion leads us directly to such a sacramental system, a
visible Church, a continuous ministry, as are manifested
in historic Christianity. We do not see our way to
abandon any of these things, which appear to us to be
either integral portions of the Divine Revelation, God's
provision for human needs, or plain inferences from that
Revelation. We go further. We advance the fact that
this belief with its practices and means of grace and in
stitutions, has been the school for saints, so fruitful, and
that so long and so persistently, in righteousness and holi
ness of life, in evangelical fervour and activity, as to de
monstrate in fact what we allege in theory.
There are indeed other points about our position dis
liked or rejected by Nonconformity. These, however, we
regard as quite secondary, though also as useful and
valuable. There are our connection with the State, and
those baronies which ages ago were attached to our
Bishoprics and still carry a seat in the stricken under
House ; with other like legacies of the past. Then again
there is the greater part of our liturgical system. These
stand in a different class altogether. We could largely
amend or part with any or all of these, and remain in
every essential exactly what we now are. We could
leave all these out of the count, and even yield them for
the sake of peace, though they would not secure peace if
we did. Leaving them aside, however, we could concen
trate on the main primary issues and ask our Noncon
formist brethren what they fear and dislike in these
principles and practices which we know as a fact to
help us God- ward. We might also ask them at the same
time to tell us what they believe they have gained by
leaving the old paths and striking out a new one for

70 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
themselves. We might inquire whether they think they
have produced more saints or a higher type of saintliness
than the ancient way, or whether God has been more
glorified and more souls saved than would have been the
case had this breaking up of unity not occurred. But
only expert theologians of rare temper can usefully enter
into these considerations. They are, I believe, quite
legitimate questions, but they are like the initial moves
of a special opening at chess, to which only experts can
do justice ; and I cannot think that a handbook of this
sort is the right place for such a discussion.
Again, there is another starting-point to which we
might go back. We might return to the early days of
the Reformation. It looks at first as if here we might
find common ground, closer in every way, and more easy
to build upon. For at that time all English Christians
who did not cleave to the Roman obedience were stirred
to their very depths. All alike, and at first all as one,
repudiated utterly and permanently the claims of the
Papacy, and the medieval system of doctrine and practice
of which the Papacy, alas ! made itself the champion.
In the proper sense of the term, then, both the English
Church and Nonconformity were and are protestant ;
though almost from the very start divergences began,
which developed without delay into a bitter, mutual
animosity. Yet at first sight it is tempting to go back to that
period and say, as it were, " We are both Protestant, we
both rejected the Papacy and medievalism, and we remain
steadfast in doing so still. Let us then return to that
day; and as joint-heirs, albeit not very united or agreed
heirs, of the Reformation, let us try to see when, where,
and why we, who had so much in common, parted and
quarrelled. We will take our stand on our common Pro
testantism, our heritage in the past when we stood so

WHERE SHALL WE START? 71
near together, and examining in a better temper and
frame of mind our positions at that time see how the
division came about."
I say that is tempting. At first it looks like a good
working plan full of promise of success. But there are
two most weighty reasons which warn us off and bid us,
at all events at present, leave the Reformation period
alone. The first and principal reason may be expressed best
perhaps in the words of the most recent, as he is also
a most accomplished and scientific, historian of the
critical period of the English Reformation. He tells us in
the course of a very subtle and exhaustive analysis of the
Puritan and Anglican theology at the moment of their
parting that "the two systems of theology took their
rise in vastly different psychological attitudes towards the
fundamental problems of theology — Man, the Universe,
God ; and differing in their premisses they necessarily
reached opposite conclusions. . . . Puritan and Anglican
were sundered by vastly different conceptions of the
Church, and of man's relation to God and to his fellow-
beings. From these fundamental beliefs came as corol
laries their attitudes towards ceremonies and towards
Church government, in a fundamental cleavage, accentu
ated by the great sanction of all medieval intellectual
systems, namely, the corporate responsibility of the
Church for the souls of men." That the account thus
given of this aspect of our Reformation is true, will, I
believe, be doubted by no competent judge. Puritan
and Anglican were, as Professor Usher says, separated,
not about a few ceremonies and words, the ring in
marriage and the cross in baptism, but by primary and
fundamental differences on the main points of theology, or
indeed of human thought. But to return to that period
and lay side by side the Puritan and Anglican positions

72 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
for minute and careful comparison would be a sheer
waste of time. It would be a waste of time, for this
all-sufficient reason, that what was in those days most
characteristic of the Nonconformist or Puritan doctrine
has practically vanished from its theology and from the
world of thought. The chief and most formative factor in
the creation of those views, which were so entirely adverse
and hostile to the views of the English Church at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, was Calvinism.
Geneva, that is John Calvin, made our Puritanism what it
was ; and those " vastly different psychological attitudes
towards the fundamental problems of religion " were
mainly due to the grafting of Calvinism on to the ideas
of a certain number of our early English Reformers.
But for that marvellous product of a most remarkable
logical French brain, there is no reason to suppose that
any fundamental cleavage would have rent England in
twain. Puritanism then (and Puritanism is the seedplot
of practically all English Nonconformity, colouring very
largely in the end even the Wesleyans, specially after
Wesley's death), Puritanism was mainly Calvinism. But
Calvinism no longer exists. Whether as an interpre
tation of Christianity, or of the relation of the Creator
and the creature, or as the chief characteristic of Non
conformity, it is far more a matter of the past, far less
a present operative force than the speculations and
metaphysics of the Schoolmen. To return then to ex
amine Puritanism in order to find a clue to present-day
Nonconformist theology would be to go off on a false
scent. The main reason, the chief influence, which led
the founders of Nonconformity to reject the system of
the English Church is now repudiated by them. They
are no more Calvanistic to-day than we are.
My second reason for avoiding an examination of the
Reformation is that we want above all things to get

WHERE SHALL WE START? 73
religious questions clear of politics. When we can do
this we shall have a fair chance of coming together.
But the salient feature of the Reformation period is the
complete commingling of religion and politics. As the
late Lord Acton truly lays down, it is impossible for any
one to say of any given matter at that time, whether it
was a matter of religion or of politics. This at least is
true, that as soon as any religious question or difference
arose it was immediately made a political one. And as
a baser currency always drives out a purer, so when these
interminglings of religion and politics take place, it has
hitherto always been the debasing of religion, not the
sanctifying of politics, that has been witnessed. The
Reformation is therefore a peculiarly bad ground of
study for us. We see religion indeed very prominent
and of paramount importance. But it is religion
secularised, debased, adulterated. We see the highest
places in Court and camp occupied by religious leaders.
But what sort of religion is it? One that actually
makes men eager to stoop to actions essentially un
christian and even flagrantly immoral. Our early
reformers in England, to get a more secure footing at
Court and to advance their cause, used without com
punction Henry the Eighth's disgraceful liaison with
Anne Boleyn ; and grave religious leaders thought it not
dishonourable to owe spiritual offices to the influence
of a light woman over a lustful man. She leaned to
the reformed religion, and the King's infatuation gave
them a chance which they used to the full.
When Servetus was in the hands of the Inquisi
tion, Calvin supplied them with information against
him ! And later, when he was in Calvin's own clutches,
no Judge Jeffreys could have perverted all law and
justice, truth and probity, more than did the great re
ligious leader of reform, who conducted the case in

74 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY.
person, so eager was he to secure a sentence of death.
Calvin too, as a trained jurist, must have been aware
of the legal, if blind to the moral enormities he com
mitted. As the Quain Professor of Comparative Law
has recently reminded us, if we compare the trial of
Socrates in pagan Athens with that of Servetus before
the court of theological Geneva — though both sentences
were a mockery of justice, "judicial murders" decided
upon before the trials began — "in the trial before the
Athenian tribunal there were none of the elements of
brutality, savagery and personal spite conspicuous in the
other." And he concludes : " Such a trial as that of
Servetus is a trial of the people among whom it takes
place ; and his condemnation is theirs also."
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was, Lord Acton
proves to us, a political conspiracy in its motive and aim.
But the hideous plan was known, approved and en
couraged by the Pope, by cardinals, bishops and priests,
who waited eagerly for its consummation, and gave
thanks to God when the good news came.
These are but concrete instances of the general spirit
which moved the religious leaders of all parties. I give,
as in honour bound, an Anglican, a Reformed, a Roman
specimen. And they are not unfair samples of the age.
Men were ready because they were religious with the
religion of that era, to resort at any moment to the
sword, the assassin, to the courtesan, to any intrigue, lie,
spy, or torture, any weapon clean or unclean, if only it
would give them an advantage for their propaganda or
for " downing " the other side. They used as a matter
of course the whole brutal machinery of a brutal penal
code to extort a confession or punish an opponent.
It was the spirit of the age, and influenced leaders
and followers alike to an extent that we do not fully
appreciate. It has been too often the business of his-

WHERE SHALL WE START? 75
torians, most of whom have written with strong bias, or
in the interests of some religious body, to touch lightly
on these facts, save when the other side was implicated ;
so that each party in the quarrel has an idea that while
its opponents were brutal and unscrupulous its own hands
are comparatively clean. But we who desire to take
a sound and unbiassed view of religious questions, and
specially of the disputes bequeathed to us by this period,
cannot afford to ignore the truth about it. The in
fluence of an untrue conception of the Reformation
period is still strong to hinder us from godly concord.
It is time we learnt the truth about it and came to
think of it as a period about which we must, one and
all, be humble and penitent. It is true that there were
real saints in those days, saintly writers and thinkers as
well as people of holy life. But that is true of every
generation since the coming of Our Blessed Lord, and it
is not in any way characteristic of the Reformation
period. What is characteristic is the secularisation of
rehgion and the general degradation of moral tone.
And therefore it is a period of singularly little spiritual
illumination, and we cannot be surprised that almost all
its theological inventions have, like Calvinism, passed
utterly away. It is not a useful period for us to return
to, nor will it give us a good basis for a better mutual
understanding. I am about to make a statement which may even
irritate some of my readers, but I ask them to weigh
it carefully and see if it is not true. The fact is, and
we are beginning to realise it, that if a particular
doctrine or practice actually originated at the time of
the Reformation, the presumption is that it is not true.
It may be sound, but the chances are rather against it.
Calvinism may be the chief, but it is by no means the
only product of the Reformation that is dead or palpably

76 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
dying. Another real " note " of the Reformation was
its Judaising tendency, and the extent to which practices
and ideas from the Old Testament invaded theology.
That is now gone. The principal and most lasting
instance of this Judaising was the purely Sabbatarian
conception of the Lord's Day. It has vanished alto
gether, provoking, as all theological untruths do when
they are discovered, a most lamentable reaction into the
opposite error. Then, not to be tedious, another great
specialty of the period was the Verbal Inspiration of
Holy Scripture, a doctrine elaborated to replace the
Papacy, and give men the safe infallible guide to which
they had been accustomed. It is gone altogether from
us — I had almost said from Christendom ; but ap
parently by a very strange irony it has found a last
refuge in the Vatican. Where is the Lutheran system,
with its highly-wrought sacramental doctrines and its
Consubstantiation ? It does not exist in Germany, where
it has been evolved into something quite different ; and if
the theory of Justification by Faith only, to which Luther,
though not its author, gave such a special character
can be said to survive, it is with its special Reformation
character changed. It need not be stated that the
Protestant theory of persecution has disappeared ; all
theories of persecution are in hiding, if not dead ; and the
many conceptions of the relation between Church and
State, the Spiritual and Civil power, which that age
produced are only recoverable now by the diligent student
of obsolete literature.
It is hard to see how things could have been otherwise,
or to expect any great spiritual illumination in such an
age, or that any holy science could have found general
acceptance in the then condition of men's minds.
It was, because it had to be, not a time of construction
but of destruction. A great edifice, a great system, had

WHERE SHALL WE START? 77
to be broken up; and all history shows that human
beings never do this work in cold blood or calmly. They
can only rise and attack and destroy when they are in a
passionate condition, and invariably they are met by a
passionate defence. The Reformation was a time of
breaking, and its real work was in the necessary negations
that had to be made. The very name of its chief force
and factor, Protestantism, proclaims this. It is a negative,
not a positive name. It implies as it were a great united
shout of " You are wrong, very wrong," or " You must
stop," or " We say No, no, and again No." And though
we may regard this as necessary and salutary, it is folly
to look to such a period for constructive guidance, or to
learn from what men did in those passionate days how
we can act or think in these calm times. It is impossible
to agree with, though easy to understand, the kind of
mind which calls the Reformation the " Deformation."
What it did had to be done. A great construction had
to be got rid of which had become a kind of prison for
human thought and character; and we ought all to be
grateful to the men who with their own hands, and often
at the cost of their lives, pulled it down. But the great
lesson which the Reformation has for Christians is to be
very careful how they build lest they again make what
ought always to be the religion of freedom, a return to
bondage; and by their religion provoke men once more
in the name and for the sake of religion, to deeds of
hatred and bloodshed and destruction. That is how we
ought to read our defaced shrines and the mutilated
statues of Our Lord, and the neglect and contempt for
religion which in the eighteenth century naturally
followed after these paroxysms of anger. All these
things are a solemn warning to take heed how we
present religion, and that we do not again, by careless
ness, or worldliness, or by trying to make religion too

78 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
popular and easily intelligible, permit it to become in
the end something which men will arise and destroy in
fury. But there can, by the nature of the case, be very
little in such a period for us to turn to as a time when
great truths would be originated, or great positive prin
ciples of human thought laid down. Each age has its
special teaching. All are times of instruction, but some
show us what to do ; others what to avoid.
And so, contrary to a widely accepted convention, we
are driven to conclude that the fact that this or that
came to the front during the Reformation, establishes a
presumption that it will be of little use to us to-day. Most
likely it will turn out to be a one-sided, unbalanced
statement of some fragment of truth torn from all its own
proper context by men in a condition of violent reaction.
It will therefore be misunderstood most of all by those
who most championed it, and very likely we shall find
it resisted in the same spirit.
Thus we may sum it up then. That everyone who
wishes to promote reunion would do well to study the
Reformation period with great care. But not as a basis
or starting-point for peace; rather to learn what cries
and watchwords, what tempers and methods to avoid ;
and above all — yes, I think above all — to learn that until
we can get religion and religious questions utterly removed
from politics we shall make no headway.
That last most necessary lesson has not yet been fully
learnt. Sometimes even now a General Election will fan
into flame the fast dying embers of religious hatred and
intolerance. It is nothing now in comparison with the
fierce cruel blaze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
but we do not want any such heat. Yet for some time to
come it will probably appear to pay a politician to fan
into flame any religious discord or disputes that may
linger on ; and though we all know in our calmer, wiser

WHERE SHALL WE START? 79
moments that these passions are an anachronism as well
as a sin, yet old associations and prepossessions die hard.
Let our Reformation history give us this great help
towards a regained unity; let it teach every religious
body that the most tempting offer of political parties
must be paid for by parting with that which is priceless,
the essential un worldliness of true religion.

CHAPTER IX
SOME FEATURES OF MODERN NONCONFORMIST
THEOLOGY
We have tried to find a short-cut or some indirect
method for dealing with the theological differences
between Nonconformity and the Church ; but none
has been discovered. There is nothing for it but to
go to work directly and consider the present position.
And at once it becomes apparent that never in the
long history of the Church and Nonconformity have
their relations been less unfriendly and the prospects
of reciprocal kindliness so good. That one can say
this with the Education question still unsettled, and
the Bill for reducing the four Welsh dioceses to poverty
actually before us, is no doubt astonishing. It means
a very solid advance in the right direction. Yet the
statement can be made I believe quite accurately.
In this connection I submit that we ought not to
regard the utterances of professional politicians or
excited Celts as representing the real thoughts of religious
Nonconformists. The statements of such persons, even
though they may be in some prominent position, should
not affect our judgment in the matter we are handling
here. There is also a type of mind, marked by a heavy
narrow malevolence, regardless of facts, insensitive to
truth, still lingering on in remote places, and brought
to the front now and again in the turmoil of party
politics. But the future does not belong to such people.

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 81
They hardly have a standing even in the present. They
are survivals from the dark and bitter past; so that
however much power they may seem to have now, we
who are looking forward need not regard them. We
might indeed reasonably wish that the real leaders of
Nonconformist thought, such men as Professor Forsyth
or Dr. Horton, would be plain and outspoken in their
repudiation of such maligners of Nonconformity. But
it would be ungenerous in us to judge these leaders
severely for their silence. It is true that their writings,
like their well-known characters and dispositions, make
it certain that this torrent of invective and misrepresenta
tion is distasteful, distressing to them. But their posi
tion must be full of complexities, and they may well find
it very hard to repudiate or rebuke a tone and senti
ments which they know to be far more harmful to
Nonconformity than to the Church. We may there
fore disregard these anachronisms, and confidently assert
that in England and Scotland, at all events, something
like the true dawn of friendliness may be discerned,
expressing itself in a hundred different ways. The
Missionary Conference at Edinburgh is one, but by no
means the most significant. All over the country when
Churchmen assemble for some special occasion, like the
Church Congress, a Nonconformist deputation with a
message of welcome and goodwill is ready to greet them.
Sometimes when a general or even a parochial Mission
is about to start, the Free Church Council of the district
will make known its sympathy and offer prayer for a bless
ing on the work. Such kindnesses, reciprocated when
occasion offers, are more than mere formalities. When
we consider past history they are more even than acts
of courtesy. They speak eloquently of a happy change
of heart and mind. For we are not, alas ! like neigh
bours whose attitudes towards each other, after being

82 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
merely negative for a long time, begin at last to be
tinged with a little mutual interest. We have an
unhappy past which gives these civilities and courtesies
a great deal of positive value. They are highly signifi
cant. Still more so are those meetings, friendly and
periodical, between the clergy and Free Church ministers
such as are now becoming not uncommon in all parts
of the country. These gatherings as friends, in each
other's houses, for prayer, for study, and in some cases
for the quiet discussion and consideration of our actual
points of difference, are highly charged with meaning.
One may admit that at present they are for the most
part rather tentative and experimental; but that such
an experiment should be made at all means that a new
spirit is abroad. Take, again, this statement from the
Free Church Year Book of 1910 : " It is one of the
most satisfactory and encouraging signs of the times
that religious men and women realise that underlying
our denominational differences there are common grounds
and common beliefs ; and many are prepared to sink
their differences for the furtherance of the Kingdom of
God. The months that are past are notable for the
fact that leaders and members of the Anglican Church
have co-operated with Free Churchmen in social and
religious work. The day is not yet come when there
can be official union between Anglicans and the Free
Churches, but the individual cases of the joining of
hands in a common cause are distinctly encouraging."
No doubt there are statements in that passage which
Anglicans would express in different language. We
should not allow ourselves to speak of "sinking our
differences for the furtherance of the Kingdom." We
reject all the connotations and implications of such a
conception. But the point worth noticing is the tone
of goodwill and desire for co-operation which breathes

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 83
through the whole quotation. Anger, contempt, " stand-
offishness " have vanished, and something like cordiality
has arrived instead.
But if these sentiments and actions stood alone they
might possibly mean not much more than an improve
ment in manners. Even this would mean a great deal ;
for after a long and violent quarrel between two men,
their resumption of a careful and mannerly treatment of
each other is an advance. But these things do not
stand alone. Rather are they the visible, tangible
tokens of profound changes which have begun to come
over men's minds. The barriers are breaking down, and
few things are more remarkable than the way in which
views and practices which were once regarded as vital,
and having the full sanction of the Bible, are now
given up, while those held in detestation or dread are
beginning to be understood and valued.
Allusion has already been made to the disappearance
of Calvinism. As in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century Calvinism was the chief cause of the rupture, so
it remained the principal obstacle to intercourse. The
Anglican and Calvinistic systems are not only dissimilar
— they are mutually repellant, not to say repulsive. The
picture of the Calvinistic mother in Alton Locke will
recur to the minds of many. " My mother moved by rule
and method : by God's law as she considered, and that
only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She
never commanded twice without punishing. She thought
herself as bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had
been some ascetic of the Middle Ages. It was ' carnal '
she considered. She had as yet no right to have any
'spiritual affection' for us. We were still 'children of
wrath and of the devil ' ; not yet ' convinced of sin,'
' converted and born again.' She had no more spiritual
bond with us, she thought, than she had with a heathen or

84 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
a Papist. She dared not even pray for our conversion,
earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. Her
clear logical mind would yield to no such inconsistency.
Had it not been decided from all eternity? We were
elect or we were reprobate. Could her prayers alter
that ? If HE had chosen us, HE would call us in His
own good time, and if not — And yet with all this she
kept a strict watch over our morality. Fear of course
was the only motive she employed, for how could our
still carnal understandings be affected with love to God ?
So our god, or gods rather, till we were twelve years old,
were Hell, the rod, the Ten Commandments, and public
opinion. As for the Bible I knew nothing of it really,
beyond the Old Testament. Indeed the life of Christ
had little chance of becoming interesting to me. My
mother had given me formally to understand that it
spoke of matters too deep for me ; that till converted
the natural man could not understand the things of
God." It is not to be supposed that every Calvinist was as
stern and thoroughgoing as Mrs. Locke. Few of them
could have been so untouched by " tender inconsistencies "
or have followed this grim stern creed with such inflexible
rectitude. However, even if they fell far short of that
thoroughness, how could men and women bred and
born in such a conception of Christianity as that recog
nise fellowship or any sort of bond of union, or feel
any sympathy, with men and women whose views were
formed by our Book of Common Prayer. And con
versely, it was almost impossible for an Anglican to grasp
that Calvinists could believe what they said they
believed. But if they actually did so, then it did not
appear as if they and the Anglican could be worshipping
the same God or have at all the same moral code.
It is true that for many generations a number of

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 85
Anglican clergy and laity were Calvinists, more or less
thorough in their views. But it is no exaggeration to
say that they held their amazing position only by at
once ignoring much that is distinctive of Calvinism and
explaining away large portions of the Prayer Book.
Its Church Catechism, its Sacramental system, and its
Articles had to suffer either complete neglect or very
violent treatment. Indeed so great a tour de force was
this combination that men of the present generation in
the Church find it impossible to understand how these
Calvinistic Churchmen maintained their position for a
week. But be that as it may, the disappearance of
Calvinism from Nonconformist theology means among
other things both the removal of the biggest barrier
between it and the theology of the Church, and a chance
of mutual understanding and sympathy such as was all
but impossible before.
Yet the passing of Calvinism is not the only barrier
which is vanishing. There is another which was only
second to Calvinism in dividing Nonconformity from the
Church. Nothing was more fiercely attacked and bitterly
resented by the Puritans than the Church's attitude
towards Catholicism and things Catholic. Their convic
tion was unalterable that anything and everything which
came down to them through the Catholic Church was
tainted with sin. The whole then existing edifice of
religious institutions, practices and habits had, they held,
to be demolished root and branch. And in place was
to be set up an entirely new system which should, they
intended, be primitive, because it would contain exactly
what the Bible, and only what the Bible, enjoined. The
Puritan believed that he insulted God by kneeling at
prayer or at communion, or by taking part in a service
at which the minister wore a surplice; because these
things which were not mentioned or ordered in Scripture

86 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
had been contaminated by association with Catholicism.
In like manner when he got the upper hand, he made it
a penal offence to observe Christmas Day. Cartwright
contended with Whitgift that it would be morally
wrong to retain anything in the Church which had been
abused under the Pope; and this meant a very compre
hensive rejection of Catholicism and all connected with
it, as well as of Medievalism and the Papacy. It in
cluded the rejection not only of things like the sale of
indulgences and compulsory private confession, the wor
ship of relics and the purchase of Masses, but equally of
the creeds, and all liturgies with everything liturgical,
such as the use of the inspired Canticles of the New
Testament, the Lord's Prayer, and the Psalms.1 Kneel
ing to pray and standing to sing were strictly forbidden,
like the observance of Christmas, Good Friday, and
Whitsun-Day, with the dedication festivals of our parish
churches and all commemorations of even Apostles and
martyrs. It was to be a clean sweep of everything that
had come down from the past. None of the organisa
tions or institutions, none of the methods and means by
which worship or the sense of reverence had been ex
pressed, none of the old habits, practices, phrases, or
principles must be allowed to survive. It was as if
another Saul had received the command against another
Amelek, " Go and utterly destroy."
Anglicans on the other hand set a high value upon
Catholic doctrines and practices. They were loath to
surrender any of their heritage from the past. They
had two immense advantages which went far to shape
their course for them. They could not begin their final
reconstructive work till forty years later than the
1 The Puritans used the Psalms, or some of them, rather as we use
hymns ; and metrical versions for singing began to appear very soon.
What is meant is that there was no regular or systematic use of the
Psalter.

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 87
Lutheran revolt, and twenty years after the setting
up of the Genevan theocracy. In this way there was
forced upon them time to think. They were unable to
act while their blood was up, so to speak, and were
only able to resume work when they had cooled. Mean
while during the waiting time they observed what was
being done abroad, saw the conflicting lines of action
and the welter and chaos of opposing principles which
appeared in the ranks of the foreign Reformers ; and so
were led to seek and formulate the principles on which
they acted when their time came. It cannot be doubted
that if the reign of Edward VI had gone on for another
ten years, or even less, England would have become a
reformed country on the approved continental lines.
Secondly, when our divines had their chance again,
almost till the end of her reign Elizabeth was a drag
upon every attempt at any positive formulation of
doctrines or practices. The results of this enforced
delay were that when at last the hour struck for the work
to be done, it was carried out by men whose temper was
calm and their principles settled, while their learning and
critical knowledge were far deeper and more scientific
than those of the earlier English Reformers. Casaubon,
one of the greatest scholars in Europe, bears testimony to
this in a most striking manner, when he describes that
to his amazement, " on arriving in England he found a
whole national Church encamped on the ground on
which he believed himself to be an isolated adventurer."
This ground was a careful scholarly effort, mistaken no
doubt in many details, but on the whole carried out with
great skill, to distinguish what was truly Catholic from
accretions and abuses, and to retain every such custom
and practice together with all rites and ceremonies which
were not forbidden by Scripture. This difference between
the Puritan and Anglican attitude towards Catholicism

88 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
was like a sundering flood as broad and effective in keep
ing men apart as Calvinism itself. But this also, if not
completely a thing of the past, is now fast vanishing.
The conception formed by Nonconformist thinkers of
to-day about Catholicism has entirely changed. Speak
ing of what we owe to Catholicism and the Cathohc
Church, Dr. Horton enlarges upon the greatness of our
common debt. " While the ideas of unity, continuity
and authority are a priceless heritage, Catholicism has
preserved other treasures which we can ill afford to spare.
The idea of unworldliness, renunciation, self-sacrifice . . .
that the Cross can only be truly preached by our being
crucified with Christ. Then Catholicism created and
preserved the idea of theology as a body of revealed
truth which must be kept untainted, and defended at all
costs against the perversion and corruption of heresy. . . .
That is the noble side of Catholic theology." He then
launches into a fine and discriminating eulogy of the
artistic fruits of Catholicism and their great value to
mankind, and continues : " Catholicism holds before our
eyes the conception of a Christianity which is one for all
mankind, and can hold all mankind in one : A body of
Divine truth which, living, develops with the ages,
absorbs all new discoveries, and teaches men the way of
God ever more perfectly : A worship which, celebrated at a
million shrines, may yet be one in idea, method and end.
A worship which unites all classes and all sorts of men by
touching at once the intellect and the heart, the aesthetic
sense and the will. It holds in its heart all the ideal of
sanctity, a noble renunciation, a sacrifice of self in the
service of humanity, a complete surrender of the indi
vidual will to God." He adds that we must not be
misled about the Reformation. " The only effect of the
Beformation of the sixteenth century was to set up
Protestantism against Catholicism, and to represent

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 89
Catholicism as the enemy. But Catholicism is not the
enemy ; it is the misguided way in which Catholicism has
been worked out. Catholicism is a noble idea ; the noblest
that ever visited the heart of man. It animated and in
spired Paul and Augustine. It is the mistaken method of
realising Catholicism that has to be combated. It is the
Catholicism in which Protestantism and Catholicism can
be merged which has to be brought back."
It is of course extremely hard to say how far such views
of, and an attitude towards, Catholicism are shared by
Nonconformists generally. Even an insider would find it
difficult to determine this, and an outsider could not even
pretend to do so. There is probably a very considerable
gap between the culture and historical knowledge of a
writer like Dr. Horton and even the more educated and
better informed Free Church members. But he by no
means stands alone in his views of Catholicism. Know
ledge of and sympathy with the Catholic ideal and types
of saintliness shown by lives of and lectures upon such
characters as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of
Siena, St. Theresa, St. Bernard, are not at all uncommon
in Nonconformist circles. And as soon as you are ready
to grant that any Church or communion is fruitful in
saints, you will cease to speak or think of it as Anti-
Christ, or the Scarlet Woman ; and you will begin to
look for its virtues and graces and to see what ideas and
practices can be adopted and what lessons can be learnt
from it. A saint-bearing Church must needs contain
much that is priceless, and if it have many faults, grace
must indeed all the more abound.
We are therefore justified in believing that though all
that Dr. Horton declares about Catholicism may not find
full echo in Nonconformity, though neither his knowledge,
nor freedom from prejudice, nor his generous warmth
may be widespread, yet these ideas of his mark a real

90 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
tendency. So that if, as a leader often does, he outstrips
his followers, he is by no means without them.
Taking then these views of Catholicism as in some
degree characteristic of modern Nonconformity, another
great barrier, almost as formidable as Calvinism, between
it and the English Church is removed, or is fast van
ishing. It was just that principle for which Anglicans stood at
the opening of the seventeenth century, as Casaubon dis
covered to his amazement. " Catholicism is not the
enemy, but the misguided way in which it has been worked
out." How grateful some of the Anglican leaders of
three hundred years ago would have been for that neat,
pregnant sentence. It was, however, what they meant
and what they stood for. We may admit that they
stood for it in a most misguided way. They thought
that the Star Chamber and fines, with the knife and the
pillory, were among the ways by which to bring men
round to their views. But then all parties alike were
convinced that it was their plain duty to God and man
to force the truth upon the world. As to that all were
of one mind. " Toleration is devilish," said the learned
and scholarly Beza, whom all revered, partly because he
held such sound and just views on the necessity of com
pelling men into the truth. But that distinction between
Catholicism and the misguided development of it, with
the consequent duty of preserving all that was Catholic
and getting rid of what was misguided, was the Anglican
position, which it maintained inflexibly and for the main
tenance of which its communion was rejected by the
Puritans. Again, closely allied with this attitude of the English
Church to Catholicism was its attitude towards things
artistic. As soon as ever it could lift up its head it
declared itself in favour of continuing to use the arts as

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 91
handmaids to religion. Poetry, music, painting, archi
tecture, carving and metal work, with dignified ritual and
ministers vested in comely if subdued fashion were natural
expression of its inner life. It belonged to the funda
mental conceptions of Anglicanism that the outward
should be used to express the inward ; that Nature was
sacramental ; and that as in the vision of the Apocalypse
the glories of the Heavenly Temple and its worship are
expressed in terms of natural beauty, by an architecture
set off with gems and gold, by the perfection of music,
by snowy vestments, and harps and crowns ; so all that
is best and most beautiful of material, and skilful in art
and craft, should be used to adorn and accompany the
House and worship of God on earth. It was not only or
chiefly that these things help the worshipper to tune
himself in mind and soul to adore his God; but that
such offerings of our very best are the least we can bring
to Him, the lowliest way of setting forth our desire to
glorify Him.
The Puritan's fundamental conception was the reverse
of this. He feared, dreaded, and detested all such ad
juncts. He approached this whole range of subjects with
opposite convictions, inspired largely by detestation of
Catholicism, which had used art so freely ; and he would
have none of these things. To some extent no doubt he
feared idolatry, and much of the carved work which he
broke down with axe and hammer all over England was
destroyed for this cause ; nor can we say that his fear of
idolatry was entirely without foundation. But he wanted
no carving or ornamentation of any kind. All he re
quired or thought safe for his soul was a bare room, the
barer the better, in which to meet for instruction, ex
hortation or petition. The one aid he allowed himself
was a little stern music, to which he sang no poetry but
uncouth paraphrases of the Psalms. All else he avoided

92 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
as a snare and entanglement, an appeal to his senses,
something that would keep him on earth and away from
heaven. There was in reality not a little tinge of Mani-
chean thought in his views of nature and the visible
world around him. It consisted he believed of a number
of distractions and temptations, which he had to thrust
aside and push his way through on his heavenly journey.
The Anglican conception of nature as a revelation of
God, and of the mystical union of the visible and invisible,
" of sermons in stones, and books in running brooks, and
good in everything," never appealed to him at all ; and
a religion that embodied such ideas seemed to him soft,
earthly and sensual.
This was a third great barrier along with his Calvin
istic creed and deep hatred of all that belonged to
Catholicism that rose up between the Puritan and the
Church. But this too is now fast ceasing to be a
strong salient characteristic of Nonconformity. Poetry,
music, architecture, they are now all valued and em
ployed. But more important because more germinal,
Nonconformists are more and more understanding the
message and ministry of art in things spiritual and moral
to the highest ends for man. Ruskin has been a great
revealer to them of the close relation of truth and
beauty, and of the essential unity of all kinds of true
beauty. Of this tendency no better expression can be
found than Professor Forsyth's Religion in Recent Art
published about ten years ago. In it he complains
almost vehemently, " Our religion has become something
harsh, strident, unlovely," and only a blind reader of
the book can fail to see how the writer's sense of the
beautiful, cultured and developed by the study of works
of art, has been to him not an entanglement in things
mundane, terrestrial, but a means of grace whereby he
has learnt something of " the fair beauty of God."

NONCONFORMIST THEOLOGY 93
When this comes to be generally understood, the com
plete reversal of the Puritan attitude towards art and
beauty, with all its tremendous consequences, is but a
matter of time. Already the movement in this direc
tion is considerable.
Here then are weighty reasons for believing that those
kindly courteous acts of which we have spoken are more
than "skin deep": more than a mere exhibition of better
manners ; and that it is not wrong to regard them as
tokens of a real approach, the broad dawn and promise of
a real friendliness. A Nonconformity which is no longer
Calvinistic, which has arrived at a sound and generous
estimate of the immense value of Catholicism, and is
beginning to distinguish between it and the misguided
use of it, while it also sees that art is divinely intended
to be the handmaid of religion, so that religion is ill
served without it; — such a Nonconformity stands far
nearer to the Church than once it did. The two systems
no longer confront one another in sharp opposition.
Some of the greatest barriers are down. Some — much —
of the work of drawing together has already been done.

CHAPTER X
THE SACRAMENTS
In the last chapter we saw three main departments in
which the movements of Nonconformist thought have
been markedly in the direction which tends towards
reunion. The importance of these can hardly be exag
gerated, for between them, as any student of English
history knows, they include " the head and front of the
offending," though not the entire body of offence.
But there are other issues of great moment in which
there has been movement, the direction of which is
not so favourable, and others again the direction of which
is not so easily decided.
On October 12, 1658, at the Savoy there was put
forth a " Declaration of Faith and Order, owned and
practised in the Congregational Churches in England :
agreed upon and assented unto by their Elders and
Messengers." It has of course, on the Congregational
principle, no binding force or authority; but it is an
important witness as to what was believed and received
at that time in that body. And our sense of its
importance is enhanced by the fact that it formed
the basis of a similar declaration issued by the Con
gregationalists in 1833. In addition to these there was
put forth in 1864 by a Committee of the Congregational
Union of England and Wales a Manual on Church
Membership, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper. The De
claration of 1658 also influenced largely an official
94

THE SACRAMENTS 95
statement by the Baptists. This latter is called
"Thirty-two Articles of Christian Faith and Practice,
or Baptist Confession of Faith with Scripture Proofs,
adopted by the Ministers and Messengers of the
General Assembly which met in London in 1689."
This again was reprinted in 1855 with a preface by
Charles Spurgeon, in which, writing to ministers, he
says, "This is not issued as an authoritative rule or
code of faith, . . . but as an assistance to you in
controversy, a confirmation in faith, and a means of
edification." As we have already seen, we cannot get authoritative
statements from these two great bodies (if body be not
altogether a misnomer for a federation of independent
congregations). But these declarations are fairly good
substitutes, and a comparison of them reveals movements
over a lengthy period. We must of course deal with the
two bodies separately, for their doctrinal positions are
by no means identical; indeed the Congregationalists
strongly affirm what it is the chief raison d'etre of the
Baptists to deny. Let us therefore begin with the
Declarations of the former and consider that part of
them which relates to Sacraments. The 1658 statement
is very full and precise. " Sacraments are holy signs and
seals of the Covenant of Grace, immediately instituted by
Christ, to represent Him and His benefits, and to confirm
our interest in Him, and solemnly to engage us to the
service of God in Christ, according to His word."
"There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation or
sacramental union between the sign and the thing
signified; whence it comes to pass that the names and
effects of the one are attributed to the other."
" The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments
rightly used, is not conferred by any power in them,
neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the

96 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
piety or intention of him that doth administer it, but
upon the Work of the Spirit and the Word of Institution
which contains, together with a precept authorising the
use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers."
" There be only two Sacraments ordained by Christ
Our Lord in the Gospel, Baptism and the Lord's Supper,
neither of which may be dispensed by any but a minister
of the Word lawfully called."
It can hardly be necessary to point out how close this
view of sacraments is to the view of the Church. There
are points of difference. The necessity, for the validity
of the sacrament of Baptism, of a duly ordained minister
is more strongly insisted upon by the Declaration than by
the Church, which accepts under conditions Lay Baptism.
But the general principle of a duly ordained minister
dispensing sacraments, that is outward signs which have
a "sacramental union with the thing signified," and
doing this not in dependence on his own piety or
intention, but "upon the work of the Spirit and the
Word of Institution, together with the precept authoris
ing the use thereof," is wonderfully catholic. It suggests
the Epiclesis followed by the Prayer of Consecration and
the Prayer of Oblation at the Lord's Table. We seem
to see the never-ending stream of souls strengthened and
refreshed by this Christ-appointed representation of
Himself in our midst, communicating to us His benefits
(" the forgiveness of sins and all other benefits of His
Passion"), "confirming our interest in Him" (what a
beautiful phrase !), and " solemnly engaging us once more
to the service of God " (" here we offer and present unto
Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies "). Apart from the
distinct question of what constitutes the duly ordained
minister there is not much to divide us in this.
Of Baptism it declares : " Baptism is a Sacrament of the
New Testament ordained by Christ, to be unto the party

THE SACRAMENTS 97
baptized, a sign and seal of the Covenant of Grace, of
his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission
of sins, of his giving up (of himself) unto God through
Jesus Christ to walk in newness of life."
Dipping (immersion) is not necessary, pouring or
sprinkling is rightly administered. " Not only those
who do actually profess faith in and obedience unto
Christ, but also the infants of one or both believing
parents, and those only," are said to be the proper
recipients of baptism ; and lastly, it is laid down —
" although it be a great sin to contemn or neglect this
Ordinance, yet grace and salvation are not so inseparably
annexed to it as that no person can be regenerated or
saved without it."
Of the Lord's Supper we read as follows : — " Our
Lord Jesus Christ instituted the Sacrament of His Body
and Blood . . . for the perpetual remembrance and
showing forth of the Sacrifice of Himself in His death,
the sealing of all benefits thereof to true believers, their
spiritual nourishment and growth in Him, their fuller
engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto
Him, and to be a bond and pledge of their communion
with Him and with each other."
" In this Sacrament Christ is not offered up to His
Father or any real sacrifice made at all for remission of
the sins of the quick or dead, but only a memorial of that
One Offering up of Himself by Himself upon the Cross
once for all, and a spiritual Oblation of all possible praise
unto God for the same."
"The outward elements in this Sacrament duly set
apart to the uses ordained by Christ have such relation
to Him crucified, as that truly, yet sacramentally only,
they are sometimes called by the names of the things
they represent, to wit, the Body and Blood of Christ."
" The Body and Blood of Christ being then not cor-

98 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
porally or carnally in, with or under, the Bread and
Wine, are yet as really but spiritually present to the
faith of believers in that ordinance as the elements
themselves are to their outward senses."
Now if for the sake of brevity we miss out the
shortened reissue of this Declaration in 1833, and come
to the Manual of 1864, we find that a considerable
movement has taken place, and not one that decreases
the distance between Congregationalists and the Church.
This is not so much the case in regard to Baptism,
the declarations concerning which are amplified and
strengthened, especially as regards Infant Baptism. On
this topic it is very forcible, using some cogent argu
ments, and plying objectors with some pertinent
questions. But it abandons what 1658 states about
regeneration : " We have no form of service which would
teach even by implication that children are regenerated
in baptism." On the other hand, the later Manual
brings out the close connection between Baptism and
the Holy Spirit, and also emphasizes the idea that each
sacrament has, and should be expected to have, some
special gift or grace connected with it. "To urge that
Baptism is an ordinance emblematical of the Saviour's
Death and Passion is to require two ordinances — Baptism
and the Lord's Supper — to represent one and the same
thing,1 and thus to leave the great and peculiar blessing
of the Christian dispensation, the Descent and Mission
of the Holy Spirit, without sign or emblem in the
Christian Church. The scriptural references to Baptism
are so frequently connected with allusions to the Descent
and Baptism of the Holy Ghost that they seem designed
to be associated in a special ordinance."
1 It should not be forgotten, however, that the New Testament
certainly does connect the two. Indeed there are no benefits of any
kind which are not closely connected with the death of Our Blessed
Lord.

THE SACRAMENTS 99
The salient point here is not the theological nicety of
the passage, but the expectation that the principal
blessings of the Christian dispensation shall be expressed
by some outward sign, emblem and symbol, and conse
quently that there shall be a clear and intelligible dis
tinction as to the grace or graces with which these
symbols shall be connected. The principle implied is
not developed at all ; indeed the writers make no sign
of being conscious of its importance; but how great
that is.
In urging on parents the duty of seeing that their
infants are baptized, the Manual says : " There is no way
in which you can so definitely and openly bring them to
Christ as in Baptism. Herein is their infant discipleship
avowed. If they should be removed from you by an
early death, you will have the satisfaction of knowing
that you omitted no means of bringing them into
contact with Christian truth.1 The responsibility of
baptized children should be urged on them when they
reach an age in which they become accountable to God.
These children of the Kingdom should be solemnly
taught the duty of repentance towards God and faith in
Our Lord Jesus Christ, and they should be encouraged
in an immediate consecration of themselves to the service
of the Lord, and to early communion with the Church."
The Manual quotes also with strong approval the declara
tion of Matthew Henry at the end of his life, when he
not only thanked God that he had been brought within
the pale of the visible Church in his infant days, but
added, " If God has wrought any good work upon my
soul, I desire with humble thankfulness to acknowledge
the influence of my infant baptism upon it." It may be,
1 We wonder why not " to Christ Himself," as in the sentence before.
It is small comfort if an infant dies within six months of baptism to
feel you tried to bring him to Christian truth ; but much to know that
you brought him to Christ.

100 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
then, that in denying any connection between Baptism
and regeneration, such as the Declaration of 1658 and
our Prayer Book lay down, the Manual of 1864 is using
the word regeneration in a different sense, and that what we
know and understand by it may after all not be rejected.
But alas ! the Manual makes it clear that these, its
views of Baptism, are not those of Congregationalists as
a whole. It deplores the fact that the practice of Infant
Baptism is greatly neglected, so that in every congre
gation there will be many young men and women, or
even men and women, who are unbaptized. That was
in 1864, half a century ago. Since then, though in
theory there has been no change, in practice the move
ment which despises and neglects Baptism has gone to
considerable lengths. Infant Baptism in particular is
treated as very open and optional, even as regards the
children of " members." I speak with reserve, because I
have naturally no first-hand knowledge on such a point;
and as no tables or statistics of Baptism are apparently
ever published, no official figures — indeed no figures at all —
are obtainable. But one who knows the life and working
of Congregationalism from within both in London and
the provinces, gives it to me as his opinion that two-
thirds of those who are attending Congregationalist
places of worship are unbaptized. In most congregations
a considerable number are only what is known as
"adherents" — people, that is, who have not accepted
" membership " ; and their children would not be
accepted for Baptism, as they themselves are regarded
as not being within " the Covenant of Grace." In after
years should these children desire to "join the Church,"
they are admitted on their mere profession of faith, and
without any condition of Baptism. It is " member
ship " on which stress is laid, and not on Our Lord's
institution. And as Baptism is thus put into a secondary

THE SACRAMENTS 101
place in connection with membership, so also is it as
regards the Holy Communion, from connection with
which it is quite dissevered. It is by no means looked
upon as wrong or unnatural, or even, it would seem,
unbecoming, that a regular frequenter of the Lord's
Supper should be unbaptized. In the Declaration of
1658 it is plainly stated to be "a great sin to despise
or neglect this ordinance." But to-day that view is
abandoned, and men and women, lifelong adherents of
Congregationalism, may live and die unbaptized without
their conscience troubling them.
The Baptists are, as their name suggests, far more
particular. Holding that infant Baptism is worse than an
empty form, they do set real store by Baptism, and it is
contrary to their system that those who are unbaptized
(this includes of course those baptized in infancy) should
come to the Lord's Supper.
Lastly, the Wesleyans to a large extent approximate
to the Church. Infant Baptism they believe in and
practise. They give a different account of the reasons
for it from those set forth in the Church Catechism, but
it is rarely that an infant is not brought to be christened.
This being the case, it follows that Wesleyans who attend
the Lord's Supper are " officially " baptized people. Yet
even in this Connection this does not seem to be
demanded. In the case of an unbaptized person joining
the Methodists as an adult, it is by no means clear that
he would have to be baptized before he was received into
the body and admitted to the Lord's Table. And
should any stranger appear who explained to a Wesleyan
minister that though he had an objection to Baptism
he would like to come to the Table of the Lord, he
would not be excluded.
On the whole, therefore, we cannot say that there has
been any movement towards the Church's belief in and use

102 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
of the Sacrament of Baptism. With the exception of the
Methodist body, we do not even begin to agree. From
the Churchman's point of view this is a very grave and
serious matter, and will give pause to those who are
inclined to think that we should freely accept as com
municants any Nonconformist who present themselves.
So far with a great variety of views in regard to the
Holy Communion there has been, thank God, no differ
ence of opinion among Churchmen about Baptism. We
may stand by it for rather different reasons, but we all
stand by it; and we are profoundly thankful to know
that we preach and minister to a baptized body. It
must have very profound, varied and far reaching con
sequences if the practice of the Independents,1 but
specially the Congregationalists, is not brought more
into line with the Declarations and Manual which have
been quoted. This is not the place to enter into a
theological argument. I am here recording facts and
their bearing upon reunion ; but it is perhaps right to
say that no single feature of modern Nonconformity will
make reunion so difficult. It is, of course, quite possible
that I may be misinformed, and that such contempt and
neglect of one of Our Lord's two "sovereign institu
tions " 2 may be unusual. In that case I am both sorry
and glad : sorry to have made a misstatement which I
shall most readily withdraw : glad, very glad indeed, to
learn that a barrier of a most serious nature, one that
I greatly fear and grieve over, does not exist.
We now pass on to what the more modern Manual has
to teach about the Holy Communion, and it may as well
be said at once that it does not make very joyful reading.
It is so different in matter and tone from the older
Declaration. To begin with, it is much more polemical,
1 I use this term to include both Congregationalists and Baptists.
2 Baptists' Declaration.

THE SACRAMENTS 103
positive, and self-confident. The reticence and restraint,
the humility and simplicity of the original have gone.
After reciting the words of Institution, from St. Matthew
only, the following points are drawn out with the con
fidence of those who know all about their subject. In
deed, that there is any need to be wary or diffident is
expressly denied. "The Lord's Supper is nothing more
than a simple memorial of the love wherewith Christ
loved the Church." Or again, still more confidently,
" The Death of Christ is a great and glorious mystery, but
in the celebration of that Death by the Church in the
Lord's Supper there is nothing mysterious." Comment
is difficult, and is perhaps the less necessary because the
Manual itself, though almost unconsciously, sees further
than that. " This simple yet significant institution 1 is
not without its deeper meaning and use. The Saviour
did not bring such an institution into His Church with
out the profoundest reason, or without having the highest
and holiest ends in view." But then why call it simple ?
Is it possible that anyone can think that an institution
which expresses the profoundest reason of Christ and is
designed by Him for the highest and holiest ends, could
by any possibility be " simple " to our poor understanding,
and devoid of mystery as we try to fathom its nature.
Moreover, on another page we read, " The Lord's Supper
is the standing monument of Christ's Death as an offering
for sin. ... It points to the forgiveness of sin and to the
new relation between God and man which has been
effected in His mysterious Sacrifice ; it is the significant
and understood sign of the closest spiritual union with
Him . . . and the pledge of everlasting fellowship with
His whole Church." That of course is not set forth as a
1 Elsewhere the Manual speaks of it as " this delightful celebration,''
which is almost as dreadful as a phrase in a devotional book by a most
popular writer, who speaks of the Gospel narrative of the Scene in the
Upper Chamber at the time of the Institution as " a winsome idyll."

104 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
complete statement of all that the Lord's Supper contains.
The Manual itself mentions other aspects. But, even so,
it is surely obvious that we are dealing with something
which will have depths beyond our plummet and distances
beyond our farthest sight ; and that it certainly cannot
be " nothing more than a simple memorial of the love
wherewith Christ loved the Church." But to continue.
After reciting the words of Institution, the Manual
declares —
" That the Bread and Wine which were used by Our
Lord underwent no change in their essential elements,
but were still Bread and Wine, and nothing more, when
they left His hand.
" That He did not bless the Bread and Wine, but gave
thanks to God for them. In the phrase, 'Jesus took
bread and blessed it,' the word ' it ' does not occur in
the original, but was inserted by our translators ; and
for the word ' bless ' St. Luke has the more appropriate
phrase, ' He gave thanks ' — that is, in the recognition of
God as the fountain of that grace which had provided
for the nourishment and invigoration of our spiritual
life." " The language employed by Our Lord when He said,
'This is My Body, My Blood,' is to be understood
figuratively, as when He spoke of Herod as a fox, or
Himself as the Door, or the Vine. When He took the
cup He said, 'This cup is the New Testament in My
Blood ' ; but the Covenant could not be the cup, and the
cup could not be the wine, and the wine could not be
His Blood. All that was meant, therefore, was that the
one thing was symbolical of the other. And so with the
Bread." "That the Body, the whole Person of Christ, was
present to the senses of the disciples at the very
moment when He uttered the words, ' This is My Body,

THE SACRAMENTS 105
this is My Blood.' His Body was not broken, nor
His Blood shed until the next day."
" That The Lord's Supper with all its simplicity is yet
a perpetual and affecting memorial of the Death of
Christ as the One Offering for human sins, and of the
infinite and exhaustless blessings which are derived from
it; and that so often as we observe it are we impres
sively reminded not only at what price our redemption
has been obtained, but for what end we have been
redeemed." It is no wonder that with this exegesis, in addition to
the propriety of obeying Our Blessed Lord's command
to come to His Table, all that they feel able to urge is,
" Come to the Table of the Lord in full and joyous
belief that in the Bread and Wine you have the type of
all that can go to nourish and strengthen you." It is
strange that the compilers of the Manual should not have
felt that such an appeal would leave its hearers cold.
Who can want a " type " of what nourishes and streng
thens him, either for his body or his soul? After
nineteen centuries of Christianity to be offered a " type "
is indeed strange. If, as the Church Catechism says, in
the Holy Communion our souls are strengthened and
refreshed by the Body and Blood of Christ as our bodies
are by bread and wine, or as the Wesleyan Catechism
says, "The Body and Blood of Christ are spiritually
taken and received by the faithful in The Lord's
Supper to the strengthening and refreshing of their
souls" — that is a grand appeal. But types! Is there
anybody who longs for a type, or will examine and
prepare himself for a type ?
But the Manual goes further still before it finishes. It
is logical in the end. Just as transubstantiation " over-
throweth the nature of a sacrament," so does this, the
direct opposite of the Roman doctrine, which proceeds on

106 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
the same lines of applying logic to spiritual things. It
all issues in this, that the Lord's Supper is not a
sacrament at all — not, to quote the Wesleyan definition
adopted from the Church, " an outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained
by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the
same and a pledge to assure us thereof"; not a sacra
ment in the sense of the Congregationalists' Declaration
of 1658 ; not that wherein there is "a spiritual relation
or sacramental union between the (outward) sign and
the thing signified " in virtue " of the work of the
Spirit and the Word of Institution," so that " the names
and effects of the one are attributed to the other." No,
it is only a sacrament in the sense of the Sacramentum
militare of the Romans, the military oath administered to
every soldier, by which he swore to obey his commander,
and not to desert his standard. So in the Lord's
Supper, in commemorating the death and the dying love
of His Saviour, the Christian avows his spiritual relation
to Him and renews his obligation to Him. " If the
word sacrament be used in this simple and significant
sense, little if any objection can be taken to it." This is
a long way from the Declaration of 1658. The Lord's
Supper, as a sacrament in the sense of that document, in
the Anglican, in the Wesleyan, in any Catholic sense, is
gone entirely. Indeed, it is evident that the Manual
would sooner that it should not be called a sacrament at
all. It agrees to the Sacramentum militare sense as a
concession which it makes with no willingness; "no
great objection can be taken" is all that it can bring
itself to say. In short, though it does not condemn, it
cannot fully approve the habit of calling the Lord's
Supper a sacrament in any sense. We have come now to
a real difference ; a direct opposition of views, and it is
our duty to try and discover the ground on which it rests.

THE SACRAMENTS 107
And it is the more important to do so because this un-
sacramentalising of the sacraments is a process which
seems to obtain widely among Nonconformists. It is
part, a very integral part, of that down-grade or un
denominational movement that is seriously threatening
religion. When, largely under the influence of that most
devout believer in sacraments, the late Hugh Price
Hughes, the " Free Church Catechism " was issued, a
hope was justified that the process of dissolution would
be stayed. For, though falling short of the Anglican and
Wesleyan, as also of the old Congregationalist view of
sacraments, the Free Church Catechism is very far from
being anti-sacramental. In answer to the question,
" What are the Sacraments of the Church ? " this Cate
chism replies, " Sacred rites1 instituted by Our Lord Jesus
to make more plain by visible signs the inward benefits
of the Gospel, to assure us of His promised Grace, and
when rightly used, to become a means to convey it to our
hearts." Omitting, for the sake of clearness, the phrase
" when rightly used " (no great alteration to make, seeing
that no body of Christians has ever attributed any grace
to sacraments wrongly used), it is distinctly a sacramental
statement, rather more popular and less precise than the
older forms, but valuable and acceptable. But so far as
an outsider can presume to judge from various signs and
testimonies, it would seem that the views expressed in
this Manual rather than those of the Free Church Cate
chism are the actual working views of a very large body.
This makes it a very grave matter for us to look into ;
because though Calvinism may have been a great obstacle, it
is indisputable that there can be no genuine unity between
a body which rejects and a body which clings to the
Sacraments of the Gospel.
1 Printed "rights" in a recent officially issued edition — a rather
indicative error.

108 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
What then does the Manual say about Sacraments in
general. We may begin by drawing attention to this
unqualified statement, " Christianity being essentially
spiritual in its nature, is not only far removed from forms
and ceremonies, but is opposed to them." Side by side
with this we may lay another sentence, " It is in the very
nature of all merely outward forms and observances to
draw the soul down to what is material, whereas the
design of Christianity is to lift us up to spiritual life and
reality." It seems rather strange that it should not have occurred
to a body of able men that of those two sentences, while
the first is inaccurate and the second is a truism, neither
really meets the case. Christianity is indeed essentially
spiritual, but being the message of God to us, so far
from being opposed to " forms " it is obliged to employ
them. God is Spirit, purely and essentially, but when
He wishes to communicate with man, who is also essen
tially but not purely spiritual, He prepared the way by
commanding a large number of forms and ceremonies to
be used, and then when these had done their work He
took upon Himself a form and came to us in one. And
being here in a form He appoints, as this very Manual
tells us so eloquently, a ceremony for our initiation into
His life. What then is really meant is what the second
sentence expresses, a sentence in which all Christendom
would join, were not some parts of it rather loath to
utter platitudes. " What is merely outward," forms and
ceremonies which are only ceremonial, gestures which are
only of the body, ritual acts which have no meaning, so-
called sacraments where there is no sacramental union
between " the sign and the thing signified," because there
is no " word of Institution with precept authorising the
use thereof," such forms as these, including prayers which
are only from the lips, do certainly tend " to draw the

THE SACRAMENTS 109
soul down." But no one asserts the contrary or ad
vocates what is " merely external."
There is undoubtedly a great danger of externalism
connected with all forms, even those which Christ Him
self gives us. But can we think that He was unaware
of this danger ? Did He not foresee the magical use
that would be made of His gifts ? Assuredly He did,
because the failure and the fault is not in forms — we
cannot suspect His gifts of being faulty — but in man,
who is ever prone to be slothful, to follow lines of least
resistance, to miss a spiritual and be content with a
material presence. Yet Our Lord, knowing all that, gave
us at least one form and two ceremonies, the Lord's
Prayer, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, and commands
us to use them continually. All three have been, are,
will be, terribly abused. But the devout Christian knows
only of one remedy, which is not the Quaker method
of rejecting them, nor this Manual's method of reducing
them to their lowest terms ; but the opposite way of
drawing out to the fullest possible extent their inexhaust
ible wealth of spiritual treasure.
This is specially true of the Sacrament of the Lord's
Supper, partly because its externals, its outward signs,
Bread and Wine, are of such transcendent beauty, partly
because, unlike Baptism, we all of us are to use it again
and again, and may therefore grow dull through an un-
spiritual familiarity. Our age-long experience shows us
that the danger is not imaginary. History is full of this
perversion; and a terrible example it is of the truth,
Corruptio optimi pessima. But the path of safety lies not
in timidity but in courage. We can sympathise deeply
with those who fear a magical or a merely formal or
purely ceremonial use of this blessed sacrament. We do
not deny, we acknowledge freely the constant reality of
the danger. Still less do we wonder at their recoil from

110 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
the Medieval system, and everything which would seem
likely to bring it back. But we would urge that instead
of fearing we should trust. Instead of saying, as it were,
" Here is this dangerous gift, we must make little of it. It
is quite a simple thing, a mere reminder, a mere monu
ment, where you will find delightful types" — we should
take the other line. Let us say in effect, Here are Bread
and Wine, God's beautiful and marvellous natural gifts
to men. He has taken them for a corresponding use in
the spiritual sphere. And now, not by any power of
man, nor by anything inherent in bread and wine, " but
by the work of His Spirit, and the Word of Institution
which contains, together with a precept authorising the
use thereof, a promise of benefit to the worthy user," they
are to us in the spiritual sphere this and that, and again
that, and still more and more. Who can estimate what
the natural bread and wine have been and are to the
human race ? Obviously they are far more to us than
mere food. That which animals eat and drink is no
parallel to what bread and wine are to man. It is a
shallow view to think of them only as repairing waste
tissue, or as belonging to and working only in the animal
part of us. In plain matter of fact, what graces and
courtesies, what fresh springs of bounty and kindness,
what deepenings of fellowship, what ameliorations, de
velopments and progresses we owe to bread and wine;
partaken of in company. And this being true of natural
bread and wine used by the natural man, surely when
the Lord Christ, " not without the profoundest reason,
or without having the highest and holiest ends in view,"
takes bread and wine to use for spiritual purposes, we
who know what vehicles of blessing they are to us when
we use them, can put no limit to what they may do for
us when He distributes them to us in the higher sphere.
But does He use them ? does He distribute them ?

THE SACRAMENTS HI
On the answer to that question the whole issue would
seem to depend. The anti-sacramentalist says, No. This
Manual of 1864 says, No. The believer in sacraments,
whether Anglican, Wesleyan, or Congregationalist, says,
Yes ; and it is on this difference that the entire matter
turns. The Manual says, No. Its words are plain, that in
this Supper of the Lord and the showing forth of His
Death " we have to think of a living but still an absent
Saviour." Of course if that is so the whole sacramental
system falls to the ground. An " absent Saviour " abso
lutely defeats it. There is no reply to the objection that
it savours of magic " to say that the pronouncing of the
simple words," (I quote the Manual again), " ' This is
My Body, this is My Blood' by a man in priest's
orders can change the elements of bread and wine into
the real Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
Not only will the words of a man fail to do this. They
will fail to do what is far more important and difficult,
they will fail to make bread and wine the vehicles of any
spiritual grace and blessing. Neither the words nor the
acts of a man can do this ; for man does not move in the
sphere where such things are done. And so if we are
to think of an " absent Saviour," then an emblem more
or less appropriate, a type more or less impressive ac
cording to the temperament of the worshipper, is all
that we can hope for, and we cannot be surprised that
thousands stay away. Whether the man be in " priest's
orders " or is " a minister of the Word duly called," or
is merely an ordinary Christian man or woman, nothing
more can result than emblems and types ; there can be
no sacrament. " But where the word of a king is there
is power"; and if instead of an absent Saviour, Christ
Himself be present, then the whole scene changes, and
the impossible and incredible become the orderly and

112 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
natural. And that of course is and always has been the
belief of the Church. It has never regarded the Saviour
as absent. The Church knows of only The One Priest
as she knows also of only the One Sacrifice, and both
abide for ever. The visible human celebrant or officiant,
whether in Baptism, the Holy Communion, or any other
function of his office, is not the representative of an
absent, but the assurance of a present Saviour. So
whether you kneel to receive in some glorious cathedral
or in the cottage of a dying peasant, whether in the
frozen north or in the tropics, whether in early youth or
extreme age, the Same Priest is always present to con
secrate, distribute and bless. How else could there be
a Christian sacrament ; how else could even those wonder
ful things, bread and wine, constitute the Eucharist of
His devoutest saints ? That is the point on which there
is the division, the presence or absence of Christ. If, as
this Manual says — and the same idea recurs in and
underlies this entire anti-sacramental movement of which
the Manual is one spokesman — if we must think of an
absent Saviour, then indeed there can be no sacraments,
nothing but emblems and types. But if The One Priest
be with us, then the sacramental system is the natural,
orderly sequence of His presence.
This principle or truth, for it is both, goes down deep,
and has a wide reach. It affects our judgment of nearly
every vexed theological question as well as our habits in
the practices of vital religion. Of the views and convic
tions of those who have been trained in the other idea
it is difficult to speak. But thousands and thousands, if
they found themselves for any reason compelled to begin
" to think of a living but still an absent Saviour " would
find not only sacraments but most of their religious
habits void of meaning. It would be a change so great
as to constitute not an alteration of their school of

THE SACRAMENTS 113
thought, but the acceptance of an entirely new religion.
At present, however, no very cogent reasons for the
change appear. The hearts of men have a wisdom of
their own, wiser often than that of their heads. The de
fence of a theological position, earnestly believed, about
the Lord's Supper may drive some truly devout minds to
allow themselves to speak of " an absent Saviour." But
when they find themselves present at this sacrament they
do not refuse to join in a hymn which expresses in part
what all Christendom feels about Christ's Own Feast —
" Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face ;
Here faith can touch and handle things unseen ;
Here would I grasp with firmer hand Thy grace,
And all my weariness upon Thee lean."
The head may argue for absence, but the heart knows
the truth, and hails a present Saviour.
Still this movement exists, away from the direction
of unity, away not only from Anglican, but from Wesleyan
and Presbyterian convictions, and also from at all events
the old Congregationalism. We are bound to record it,
to examine it, to call attention to it. That it is in ac
cordance with, probably a direct fruit of, the rapid spread
of undenominationalism ; that the pseudo-liberal mind
applauds and justifies it; that in short it will be popular
and have a vogue, make it something which all those who
set store by the sacraments as well as reunion are bound
to watch and try to counteract.
One thing makes for hope, namely, that change of view
which has come over Nonconformity in regard to the
beauty of the Universe and the relations of religion and
art. For that point of view is truly sacramental. It
means really that there is no such thing as the " merely
outward " ; that the things which are seen are but a veil
through which even now more or less clearly we can
H

114 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
discern the spiritual. It means that our spiritual God
is always ministering to us His created spirits, mediating
His spiritual love for us through material things, and
that the whole of our material environment is ordered
and arranged that through it and by means of it we may
become more and more spiritual. If this lesson be learnt,
then we shall be quite sure that a religion which finds no
place for genuine sacraments is out of harmony with the
universe, with our nature, and with the laws of our being,
and that it cannot be permanent any more than can a
religion which finds neither welcome nor employment nor
instruction for our sense of beauty.

CHAPTER XI
THE CHURCH, THE MINISTRY, AND THE
EPISCOPAL PRINCIPLE
It is a common belief that one of the most important
differences between the Church and Nonconformity is
found in their respective principles concerning the
ministry. Almost all Nonconformist writers and speakers
on the subject are quite clear that this is the case ; and
most people have had the idea well drilled into them,
that whereas in the Church there is a great and well-
marked distinction between clergy and laity, no such
distinction is to be found in Nonconformity. The
Church is frequently spoken of as a poor priest-ridden
body, honeycombed by sacerdotalism from which the
Evangelical bodies are free. Yet not quite free ; even
in them there are hankerings, feeble, tentative essays
after the forbidden thing. A stalwart of Nonconformity,
a writer who has many followers, Mr. J. Brierley, whose
books it is a pleasure to read, has detected signs of it.
After writing in his usual picturesque, forcible manner
and exposing the snares of sacerdotalism, he adds : " Non
conformists not a few need to learn this truth afresh.
Let them be done for ever with dressings-up and gestures
and postures." Yet it is undoubtedly the case that, as
far as the ministerial principle goes, there is no difference.
Whether you take the Baptists, Congregationalists, or the
Wesleyans, it is exactly the same. They have a ministry
marked off from the people in just the same way and on
116

116 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
the same principle as the Church. The principle is
applied in a slightly different fashion, but it does not
vary in substance. With the Presbyterians this is
notoriously the case. The old gibe that "the new
presbyter was only the old priest writ large " contains
more than a grain of truth. If to entrust and confine
strictly, high spiritual powers and duties to a special
ministerial class is sacerdotalism, then the Presbyterians
are certainly quite as sacerdotal a body as the English
Church, but the difference is only in degree, not in kind ;
and Evangelical Free Churchmen like Romans, Presby
terians, or Anglicans, are all sacerdotal bodies. I mean
they are all bodies in which certain very important spiri
tual functions may not be discharged except by a member
of the ministerial class.
It is useful to bring this out plainly since it is an
important fact, yet one which is often glossed over, be
cause it is not popular in England. We are all for being
on an equality. We dislike the idea that another may do
what is forbidden to us. It irritates and seems unfair,
unless, perhaps, he has proved himself a better man.
Once convinced of the necessity of an authority into
whose hands some function must be put, our common
sense comes to our rescue, so that nowhere in the
world have the police such sway. We give them instant
obedience. But the case must be very plain, or we do not
see it, and we have not yet seen it in regard to religion.
So you have only to say " sacerdotal," and the English
man's back begins to get up. He would like, he would
very much like, to have a Christianity without any but
lay officials. Even though his own " parson " be an inti
mate friend, he nevertheless has a half contemptuous
grudge against parsons as a class. They are officious
managing fellows, with pretensions that he cannot quite
bring himself to tolerate.

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 117
Yet you cannot have a religious body without them.
The name changes ; you may call them priests, or clergy
men, or pastors, or ministers, or, if your sense of humour
be undeveloped, you may call them angels. You may
also slightly vary their functions, as they themselves do
their collars and waistcoats; but the principle is in
variable. Mr. Brierley half knows this, but dislikes it very keenly.
In his Eternal Religion he devotes a good deal of
picturesque and vivid writing to it. He rightly eulogises
primitive Christianity as a great and glorious thing;
but it only lasted, he laments, a very short time. Swiftly
its end came, and then followed " the greatest perversion
of history"; so he calls it. "We have in the following
centuries a Christianity which is an amalgam of the teach
ing and life of Jesus with the priestism and clericalism with
which Judaism and heathendom had combined to endow
it. Christianity had ceased henceforth to be a layman's
religion." He admits grudgingly that " this bastard un
authorised priesthood produced great characters " ; and
later on he adds, as if conscious of a tendency in himself,
" It would indeed be out of place to exclaim too excitedly
against the course which things took in mediaeval
Christendom. It would be better, perhaps, to recognise
that this was the course the world in its inner evolution had
to take." But the spectacle is too much for him. He
quotes the well-known picture of St. Jerome, Walter de
Map's twelfth-century satire, and the English Black Book
(as an authority too !), and exclaims, " Thus it was with
the clergy. It fared even worse with the laity, who
were lost for centuries to vital religion." But his
knowledge and candour are too great for him to leave
the matter there. He has to say " Abusus non
tolit usum. . . . Primitive Christianity certainly had its
separated ministries. It stands to common sense that

118 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
a religion which rests on teaching must have teachers;
and that teaching, to be continuous and effective, must
have its specialists."
So we are back where we were. These " bastard "
priests are only bad specimens of a good thing. There
were " parsons " from the first, even in the primitive
Church, and it stands to common sense that they must
always exist. You cannot get away from them. The
principle is of the essence of Christianity, and of corporate
life. And these ministers must be priests. Mr. Brierley's
commendation of primitive Christianity is to a large
extent based on the fact that, " against all precedent and
usage, here was a faith with a layman for its founder, and
laymen for its first propagators." The sentence reveals
a strange frame of mind. Its history is not easily
defended. All the great faiths of the world have been
founded by laymen. Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, are
all laymen. But was Our Lord a layman ? There is
good authority 1 for believing that to Him belonged
eternal priesthood, and that He was not only Priest, but
High Priest. And if St. Peter and the rest of the
Twelve were called as laymen, they certainly did not
remain so, any more than St. Paul did, who, by the
direct message of the Holy Ghost, was solemnly set apart
with prayer and the laying on of hands for the work
which had been appointed for him.
The point is worth making, not to chop logic with
Mr. Brierley, but because it serves to bring out a
primary principle of Christianity. He who ministers
with and for Christ and in His Name — that is, as
representing Him — must needs have more than a little
of the Priest about him. And, again, he who performs
functions in and for the Priestly Body must have
1 For instance, the central argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 119
something of the priestly character. And — perhaps more
cogently still— it belongs to manhood to be priestly.
It is of the essence of the office of priest to offer sacrifice
and prayer to God for others and for self, and to
seek to bless, not to be blessed. But the more true
we are to the real purposes of manhood as God re
veals them to us, the more readily and fully we do
all these things, and The Perfect Man is The Perfect
and Eternal Priest. So the truth is that in the fellow
ship of Christ, The Perfect Man, it is not that there
are no priests, but there are no laymen. The very
point of the revelation of Jesus Christ is the essential
priestliness of humanity, its call and its capacity to be
purely and wholly devoted to God's service. " He
hath made us priests unto God."
He, then, who is set apart for certain functions in
this human and therefore priestly fellowship would be
separated from his fellows if he ceased to be priestly.
No one hopes or wishes that the officers of the army
shall not be soldierly. And what we do indeed most
sorely need to-day throughout Christendom is not to
reduce or set limits to the priestliness of the Christian
ministry, but to insist on and realise the priestliness
of the so-called (but never in Scripture) laity. In the
New Testament it is not the word, it is rather the
connotations of the word " layman " that are absent.
What we call the laity are in the New Testament
called individually "brethren," because belonging to
the family of God; and "saints," because of the
fellowship of the sanctifying Spirit ; and " the elect," be
cause called to special work and honour ; or, collectively,
" a royal priesthood, a holy nation." And what we want
is not a pulling down, but a levelling up. Nothing will
ever be entirely effective in keeping the clergy in their
proper place except their finding themselves surrounded

120 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
by a royal priesthood, every member of which is in his
place, fulfilling his duties of sacrifice, prayer, and bene
diction. And the conclusion to which we are forced
is that it is not the priest, but the layman, that must
disappear from Christendom.
Now this priestly body requires a ministry, just as,
mutatis mutandis, a naval or military, or civilian body
does. A ministry means, of course, officials or officers,
and these officials, or at least the most conspicuous of
them, will have important functions to perform. The
duties incumbent on the whole body, which it cannot
discharge en masse, but must delegate, will include of
necessity those in particular which require special
qualities or present special difficulties. Thus the ad
ministration of justice, the conduct of foreign affairs,
the settlement of national finance, must be entrusted
to permanent officials ; and direct interference by the
nation is almost invariably calamitous. But precisely
because the functions assigned are so important, the
appointment of such officials is always reserved for the
Sovereign Power in the State. In a despotism every
official is directly or indirectly appointed by the
monarch ; in a democracy like ours it is by the
sovereign people.
This principle is applied strictly in the appointments
of the Christian ministry. The Sovereign Power ap
points, and that is God. The basal fact in the Christian
ministry is what is known as a " call " or " sense of
vocation " — something, that is, which leads a man to
believe that it is God's will and wish that he should
minister for and before Him. "The call" may come
in a hundred different ways, but it must come. The
Sovereign Power must appoint. Every single Christian
body is at one here.
But the matter does not rest there. In mundane

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 121
affairs the ruler makes his appointments public and
grants such tokens as will make the fact of an appoint
ment clear to all. In regard to these priestly appoint
ments it is even more necessary that this should be
done. A man may be unconsciously self-deceived, may
think he has received a call when he has had none.
Vanity, self-interest, the wishes and promptings of
parents, the half-blind choice of immature years, may
any of them induce a belief that has no foundation in
fact. It has ever been believed, then, that if God
indeed calls a man, he will make the call clear to the
body which he is to serve, and that it belongs therefore
to the body to ratify the call. So strongly is this
felt that the call does not become operative till the
body has ratified it. When both the individual and
the body concur, then the man's position as a minister
is considered to be indisputable ; and only one thing
more remains to be done.
If an earthly sovereign appoints an officer, he takes
care to see that he supplies, so far as a human being
can supply, all the power or powers needed for the
discharge of the duties of the office. So when God
appoints, it is believed that He also confers the
necessary powers. But it is also believed that by a
natural and gracious dispensation, God both ratifies
His call and confers the power to fulfil it, through
the body to which he gives the new minister. Hence
that most solemn and joyful rite of ordination in which
with deep thankfulness the priestly body receives from
God one whose call it has investigated and accepted ;
while he receives through (but not from) the accepting
body — first, the assurance that he is not mistaken in
believing that God has called him ; secondly, the necessary
power to fulfil the call.
We may now consider the duties which this minis-

122 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
terial priest has to perform. In the semi-biblical
phrase of the old Protestantism of both Presbyterians
and Independents, his primary duty is to " administer
the seals." It is a phrase which in England is now
almost forgotten, though still in use in Scotland. "The
seals " is of course another name for " the Sacraments,"
and denotes that view of them which is indicated in the
Church Catechism by the word " pledge." When a
sovereign makes a grant, he not only gives his word, but
seals a document, and so pledges himself, as it were, to
the grantee, for his greater comfort and assurance in
years to come. The Sacraments of Baptism and the
Holy Communion are such seals or pledges to us. The
ministering of the sacraments or " seals " has always
been and still remains the duty of the ordained minister
in the theory and practice of Anglican, Roman, and
Protestant Nonconformist. But there is the further
duty on which Mr. Brierley remarked, " The teaching
body must have its teachers " ; and the other side of the
ministerial work to that of " the seals " is the teaching
or prophetic office. The Christian minister is pastor
and teacher, or, as our Prayer Book phrases it, has " the
ministry of the Word and Sacraments." The former
includes all branches of the teaching office whether in
pulpit or classroom or private talk ; and the latter must be
held to include, not only the actual handing or handling
of the sacramental elements, but safeguarding them
from unworthy use ; and aiding and inciting to their
more worthy use by unfolding to his brethren, and
leading them in, all those acts and experiences of prayer
and devotion which belong to our corporate life in
Christ. These, then, are the principles of the Christian ministry;
the Divine call of the individual, its acceptance and
ratification by the body, the conveyance through the

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 123
body of empowering grace, and in consequence one more
life set apart for the ministry of the Word and Sacra
ments. They are recognised and acted upon in practi
cally every Christian communion ; and though many
different circumstances and considerations, racial and
doctrinal, for instance, will cause variations in the
ordination rites and the stress laid on different duties of
the office, yet in substance these main principles do not
vary, and have not varied since the beginning.
It can hardly be necessary to point out that in the
Anglican communion this is both the theory and the
practice. No one can have read the Ordinal with any
attention and not observed this. It comes out perhaps
most explicitly in the long and careful public examination
of those who are being admitted to the Order of Priest
hood. After the opening question as to whether they
believe themselves inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost
to undertake this office and work, they are examined
about the chief duties and responsibilities which will
fall upon them ; that is to say, that the contents and
meaning of the call are fully drawn out, so that the
reality of their conviction of call may be firmly estab
lished. Previous to this they are presented to the people
whose assent to their ordination is demanded by their
being given solemn opportunity to allege any known
unfitness. Nor is this the first time that the approval
of the people is asked ; rather it is a last opportunity
given in case of accident. For every man who proposes
to be ordained must, on a Sunday at one of the principal
services, and in the church where he is best known,
announce his intention some weeks in advance, and ask
anyone who may doubt his fitness to communicate
with the Bishop. It is not till after all this and more —
a careful personal inquiry into past life and character,
attainments, knowledge, intellectual capacity, spiritual

124 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
earnestness, and training — that, in the name of the whole
body, the fact of call is acknowledged and ratified ; and
in the Name of God, the body (not gives, but) conveys
as a humble agent, or even channel, the empowering
grace. These facts, however, suggest to us that one special
ministry remains to be considered. We have seen that
it is in regard to the more delicate and difficult corporate
functions that a body cannot act except through chosen
officials ; and we believe that this holds true of the
priestly fellowship of Christ. Now plainly no task can
be more delicate or difficult than that of determining
the question of vocation. To judge whether a man is
called or not called involves, as those who have had any
experience know, problems so complex that the solution
of them is beyond human skill. And the responsibility
is tremendous. To refuse one whom God has called is
terrible ; but to admit one whom God has not called,
who offers himself in self-conceit, or at the whisper of
vanity, or for any worldly or less lofty motive, is devas
tating. The Christian body is therefore in very special
need of a ministry to which is committed, what for want
of a better phrase we may call the keeping of the door
of the ministry. No one, I believe, questions the
enormous importance of this task being rightly done.
No one dreams that it can be done except by an officer —
I mean that it is not work which can be done by the
body en masse — and therefore we are led to believe and
expect that there will be special ministers to whom this
function is assigned.
But it is also part of our principles of ministry to hold
that it is God who calls or chooses His ministers; and
no one can doubt or does doubt that from the second
century till the seventeenth He did choose for this work
the class of church officers known as Bishops, and that

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 125
He chose no others. Just at the end of the first century,
and for part of the second, it is not quite clear who did
anything. At present very many things are obscure
about that period. But " the argument from silence "
has no weight, and there is nothing to lead us to believe
that a different method was adopted or a different
ministry employed for this work by God in that epoch
of which we know so little. It may be added also that
the latest and perhaps so far the best equipped writer on
the subject in English, Mr. C. H. Turner, in volume i.
of the Cambridge Mediaeval History, certainly does not
make the continuous place of the Episcopate in the
Church from the very beginning less likely, to say the
least. But there is no need to labour the point, and
nothing can be gained by stupidly claiming that some
thing has been demonstrated 1 when able and honest men
deny it. What is not denied is enough. For it is not
denied that whatever happened in that obscure period and
during the then necessarily incohate condition of almost
all Christian institutions, from the end of the second
century onwards, the appointed, and therefore the
Divinely-appointed, officers to deal with those who
thought themselves called to the ministry were bishops,
and only bishops, and never anyone else. For all those
centuries, glorious centuries for the most part, when the
greatest victories of the Cross were won ; centuries of the
most romantic, chivalrous, and inspired evangelising;
centuries when humanly speaking nothing but the Church
(and at times not much more even in the Church than
the ministry), stood between the world and the extinction
of the Gospel as well as all civilisation ; centuries, there-
i We may say "probable" or "highly probable," because that
means it is still a matter of opinion. We may say "practically
proved," because that means " not proved yet," but it is absurd to say
"proved" or "demonstrated."

126 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
fore, when everything in the Church, but especially the
ministry, was tested in a furnace heated sevenfold, as no
ministry has ever been tried in modern times — through
all those centuries the only ministry the Church had was
that which it received through the Episcopate. We are
not driven to think or even to believe that God does
actually call and choose His ministers. Nor is it for
Christian people of any denomination to think that for
all these centuries God chose the Bishops for this task,
for if they know anything of the history of Christendom
they will be absolutely sure of it.
But it is worth while to draw out the real relation of
the Episcopate to the ministry. It is so often both
attacked and defended on one point only — namely, that
solemn act when in God's Name and in that of the body,
the Bishop acknowledges the reality of the call and is the
means of conveying the Divine, empowering grace to the
called. But though this action is indeed most solemn,
impressive, and grace-giving, it is by no means the only
or chief duty of a Bishop in regard to ordination. On
the contrary, it is only the last act (the climax, if you will)
of that process of determining on behalf of the body
whether the man be truly called, or, in other words,
whether God has, as it were, plainly announced His
will that this special man shall serve Him in this way.
In short, the real work of the Episcopate as regards the
ministry is not merely to perform the act of ordination,
but to test fitness, and to sift out from the larger number of
those who think they have a call, the smaller number of
those who really have, so that for the whole body the
Episcopate may be able to ratify and acknowledge those
who truly have a vocation.
It is the ignoring of this larger aspect of the task which
has made the work and place of the Episcopate in the
Christian ministry appear to some mechanical. By those

THE EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 127
who cannot see below the surface of things, it has been
conceived of as almost wholly "ritual," and both
attacked and defended on that ground. Whereas in
truth the act of ordination is but an incident, though a
crowning incident if you like, in a Bishop's task. What is
really vital and of moment is that sifting and testing
of vocations — that examination, in the widest sense, of the
men who believe themselves called, a work which is at
once so delicate and difficult and yet so necessary. It is
possible that those who find it hard to accept the idea of
an order of the ministry appointed for the act of ordi
nation would more readily accept it for the wider
purpose. Indeed, when we think how difficult and yet
indispensable is this testing of vocations, the idea of
an order specially endowed with gifts for such a task is
not so incredible.
And further, an order set apart for this work, and
given the gifts needed for its performance, would naturally
have entrusted to it the guidance and discipline of those
who, both in God's Name and the Church's, they have
tested and admitted to the ministry. They would
naturally be the leaders or captains of these ministers in
all matters in which united action was necessary ; and this
fact would in and of itself make them the leaders of the
Church in all her activities.
We have spoken of the Episcopate as having done
all these things from the second to the sixteenth
centuries, because during that long period (nearly the
whole life of the Church), they alone performed these
functions for it.
But this same Episcopate continues unchanged. Still,
east and west, north and south, it discharges the same
solemn, responsible office in connection with ordination.
Even in the Church of Rome, where modern Vaticanism
has deprived the ancient Episcopate of almost all its

128 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
functions and responsibilities, this one survives to a very
large extent.
One further thought must, however, be added. Hitherto,
as is proper and right, we have been thinking and
speaking of the principles of the Church's ministry, and
have described and appraised its value when properly
used. It is not denied that there have been periods
when this was not the case — when in rough times of low
moral standard, the spirit of the world, and that a very
coarse and evil one, has had the upper hand. There
have been infamous bishops and priests, and idle, careless,
money-loving ones. But the work of an instrument must
be gauged by what it does when used by capable hands
for the work it is designed to perform. And so judged
the Christian ministry, as we see it in age after age, has
a history that entitles us to call it one of God's chief
gifts, not only to the Church, but to human progress.
But of this great gift the Episcopate has been all the
time the most precious and vital part, seeing that all other
Orders of the ministry have, under God, depended chiefly
on it for their efficiency and excellence.

CHAPTER XII
THE CHURCH AND THE MINISTRY (continued)
The Non-Episcopal Ministry
But if this be the part assigned to the Episcopate in the
divine order as regards the Christian ministry, how
shall we view and judge that large body of Christian
ministers who reject the Episcopate, and who have had
no dealings with any Bishop ? It is a new, even a recent
phenomenon in the Christian world ; and so grave and so
great that we must pass no quick judgment, and yet we
must make up our minds. This, however, is difficult, for
there are few subjects round which a hotter or more
prolonged controversy has waged. Can we hope calmly
and justly to weigh and judge such an issue ?
But first we must allow the great bodies to whom
these ministers belong to declare their principles in
this matter. In what light do they regard the
ministry, and in what esteem do they hold it ? For what
purposes do they employ it, and with what care do they
safeguard it ? The answers to all these questions, let it
be said at once, are such as one would expect from great
communities of earnest Christian men. As already has
been said, they hold views of the Christian ministry which
in principle are identical with those of the Church.
There is the same demand for a Divine call — the same
careful inquiry made by the body, so that it may be
assured that the individual is not self-deceived. There is

130 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
the same solemn ratification before the call can become
operative, and the same solemn commissioning and
empowering in the Name of God. And the ministers so
set apart are employed to fulfil the same functions, the
ministration of the Word and Sacraments. Forms,
rites, ceremonies, differ, as they have differed from age to
age, and differ now in different parts of Christendom.
When I say that they are the same I am speaking of
substantial, not verbal or ritual identity.
No amount of difference of nomenclature can hide
the fact that the difference between the ordained
minister and the unordained member is the same in the
Nonconformist conception of it as in that of the Church.
We have already seen x in the Congregationalists' De
claration of 1658 that the two Sacraments can only be
administered by a minister of the Word lawfully called.
The same is the view of the Baptists, who hold that
" Baptism and the Lord's Supper are ordinances of
positive and sovereign institution, and are intended to be
continued till Our Lord's Second Coming." But " they
must not be administered except by those who are
qualified and called thereunto according to the commis
sion of Christ"; which means the same as the "lawfully
called" of the Congregationalists. This means further
the ratification by the body of the individual's belief
that he is called, duly followed by a solemn service of
setting apart, in which a laying on of hands is, though
not always or necessarily, a part. Among the Wesleyans
the view taken of ordination may perhaps best be illustrated
by the turning-point in the career of one of their best-
known preachers, the late Rev. Peter Mackenzie. He
was a collier or coal-pit hand, " rough and ready," and of
a wonderful natural eloquence, racy, vivid, and with an
exuberant sense of fun. His power was great. He could
1 See p. 96.

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 131
sway audiences as few could. But all efforts to give him
any culture and even the rudiments of scholarship were
vain. There was a sharp discussion about him between
two parties, the question being whether he should con
tinue a lay preacher or should be ordained. It was
objected that a man who could not go through the
ministerial training ought to remain a layman. In the
end he was made a minister, and the reason why he and
his friends were desirous of this is easily seen. It was not
that he might give up more time to the work. He was
already giving his whole life, and there was no question
of his drawing back. Neither was it, as hardly need be
said, for social reasons or that he might have a better
standing. That would not have influenced him. It was
because, in Wesleyanism as everywhere else, the minister,
the man who belongs to what Mr. Brierley properly calls a
" separated ministry," has a spiritual status and gifts
which belong to that office. No doubt Mr. Mackenzie
and his friends would have phrased it differently. They
might have said that he could speak with more power,
or that he would be listened to in a different way ; but it
comes to the same thing : it rests on the same conception
of ministry as consisting of call, recognition, ordination.
And this brings us to another point — the great care
taken by Nonconformist bodies for the proper training of
their ministers. They have their Training or Theological
Colleges, where a careful and very thorough instruction
and preparation are provided for ordination candidates,
as we should call them. In these, which are for the
most part supported out of the central funds of the de
nomination, there is given to the postulants for the
ministry that which shows conclusively how highly that
ministry and its importance to the body are rated, a
specialised professional training far longer than most
men get for the Church of England's ministry.

132 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
With what profound feelings they contemplate this
ministry, and in what estimation it is held, we need hardly
explain. They have a conception of it as lofty as that
which obtains in any branch of the Church. Take this
passage from Mr. Jowett's Passion for Souls. He is
speaking particularly of the ministry, if not actually to
ministers. " Here then is a principle. The gospel of a
broken heart demands the ministry of bleeding hearts.
If that succession be broken, we lose our fellowship with
the King. As soon as we cease to bleed we cease to
bless. I do not know how any Christian service is to be
fruitful if the servant is not primarily baptized in the
spirit of a suffering compassion. We can never heal the
needs we do not feel. Tearless hearts can never be the
heralds of the Passion. We must pity if we would re
deem. We must bleed if we would be the ministers of
the Saving Blood. We must perfect by our passion the
Passion of the Lord, and by our suffering sympathies we
must fill up that which is behind in the sufferings of
Christ. If we pray in cold blood we are no longer the
ministers of the Cross. True intercession is a sacrifice.
" St. Catherine told a friend that the anguish she ex
perienced in the realisation of the sufferings of Christ
was greatest at the moment when she was pleading for
the salvation of others. 'Promise me that Thou wilt
save them,' she cried, and stretching forth her right
hand to Jesus she again implored Him in her agony
' Promise me, dear Lord, that Thou wilt save them. 0
give me a token that Thou wilt.' Then her Lord
seemed to clasp her outstretched hand in His, and to
give her the promise, and she felt a piercing pain as
though a nail had gone through her palm.
" I think I know the meaning of the mystic experience.
She had become so absolutely one with the interceding
Saviour that she entered into the fellowship of His

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 133
Crucifixion. Her prayers were red with sacrifice, and she felt
the grasp of the Pierced Hand. Are we in the succession ?"
There speaks a true priest and his words, and the
underlying conceptions of ministry will find response in
the hearts of God's priests all the world over. And not
only do they hold the ministry in high esteem and form
a lofty ideal of what it is and should do ; they also care
for it with practical wisdom as regards its temporal side.
There is no little discipline and much generous provision.
The Wesleyan system of a move every three years for
their ministers may be more speedy than wise. But it
has a great deal that is sound about it, and is accom
panied by much that is beneficent. All this, however,
testifies to the fact that the Nonconformist minister is
held in honour for his office and his work.
These then are their principles and practices in regard
to the ministry. One cannot help feeling that at present
Nonconformists themselves do not fully realise what they
are and include. They have not yet for the most part
faced the fact that they believe in and possess an or
dained ministry, and that they can be as fairly divided
into laity and clerics as any other bodies in Christendom.
They frequently appear to run away from the plainest
consequences of their own constant actions, as if half
ashamed or half afraid to admit that they train with
great care and effectiveness a large body of clerics or
clergymen every year. And the result is that to the
best of my knowledge they have not yet explored and
analysed the contents of their own ministerial principles.
Their writings, generally so clear, are on these points
confused, self-contradictory, and halting.
Here even more than on other subjects they are apt to
set up as antithetical, ideas which are in reality comple
mentary. Even Professor Forsyth, usually so calm and
lucid a thinker, sets up pulpit against altar, priest against

134 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
apostle, apostle against prophet, bishop even against
missionary and preacher, regardless of the truth that
these conceptions are rather complementary to one
another. "In Catholicism, worship," he declares, "is
complete without a sermon, and the preacher's education
suffers accordingly." But it does not. Nowhere is so pro
longed and minute a training given to the preacher for his
equipment in all that makes preaching effective as in the
Roman Church. " So, conversely," he continues, " if the
preacher is belittled the priest in enhanced." That, again,
is surely contrary to experience. Whether in the bulk or
in the individual, nothing so lowers the estimation in
which a priesthood or a priest is held as failure to preach
well. " If," he goes on, " you put back the pulpit, by the
same act you put forward the altar." But the opposite
is really the case. A pulpit poorly filled, ineffective and
allowed to fall into the background, leads to an altar
neglected ; and, conversely, an effective and prominent
pulpit means a thronged altar. " The first Apostles," he
avers, " were neither priests nor bishops. They were
preachers, missionaries, heralds of the Cross." What can
that possibly mean ? Take the case of any country in
which the work of evangelisation is at its beginning.
We could say with the utmost propriety and accuracy of
language and thought, " Its first bishops and priests were
preachers, missionaries, heralds of the Cross." Or we
could say, " Its first preachers, missionaries, and heralds
of the Cross were bishops and priests." There is abso
lutely no antithesis at all to be made out of these five
nouns. One man can be all five, and the first Apostles
were so. I do not know in what sense of the word Pro
fessor Forsyth is using the word " Bishop," but if it means,
as seems most probable, one who is an organiser and a
statesman of religious work and institutions then, though
it be true that in a still heathen land a " Bishop " who

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 135
is not a preacher and missionary and a herald of the
Cross will be of little use, it is no less true that unless
the missionaries have a " Bishop " among them they will
lose much, and are like to lose all, of the fruit of their
labour. St. Paul, the greatest preacher, missionary, and
herald of the Cross that the world has ever seen, is also
the greatest " Bishop." In grandeur of conception,
strategic wisdom, power of organisation, skill to adapt
the Gospel to the needs of the country he was in, in
statecraft and worldly wisdom (witness the way he
sometimes used and refrained from using his status as a
" Roman "), he has never been surpassed, if he has ever
been equalled. He knew how to consolidate the fruits
of victory into a permanent conquest, and how to make
each city won the stepping-stone for further advance.
He would not have been the great missionary he was
unless he had also been so great a Bishop; just as truly
as that he could not have been a great Bishop if he had
not been so great a missionary. At the end of the
paragraph from which I have been quoting, the Professor
sums it all up in these words: "The Sacrament which
gives value to all other sacraments is the sacrament of
the living Word." If by " the living Word " he means,
as we may hope he does, Our Lord Jesus Christ, then
there is not a Churchman in the world, or an extant or
an obsolete Church principle, that is not in cordial agree
ment with him. That there are no true sacraments which
are not extensions of the Incarnation is at all events the
catholic principle. If, again, he means the Bible, the state
ment is on the face of it incorrect. If he means the Gospel,
the entire message of salvation, then either he is suddenly
changing, without a word of explanation, the sense in which
he is using the word "sacrament " — a proceeding not likely
to aid clear thinking — or else he is uttering a truism which
no one, even an infidel, would for a moment doubt.

136 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
I have so profound a respect for Professor Forsyth,
from whom I have learnt much, that criticism of his
writing is an unpleasing task. But just because he is so
eminent in his thoughtfulness and spirituality, his strange
lapse, as one cannot but judge it, from his usual lucidity
and judgment establishes better than would a quotation
from a lesser writer, this inability and unwillingness on
the part of Nonconformists to grasp their own admirable
principles in regard to the Christian ministry.
Mr. Brierley is in the same condition. " Sacerdotalism,"
he tells us, " contends that ecclesiastical authority comes
from above, and not from beneath. . . . With the highest
Churchman we too believe in an authority that comes
from above. The true teacher and spiritual leader has
ever his vocation from ou high. It begins there between
his soul and God, most august of commissions and of
consecrations. Thus commissioned he stands there among
his brethren, of and with them always, his note union,
and never separation."
But on Nonconformist, as on Church principles, this is
a very incomplete account of how a man becomes a
Christian minister. " He has his vocation from on high.
It begins between his soul and God." Yes, but it does
not end there. He does not become a Nonconformist
minister in that way. The call begins it, but the body
must acknowledge it. He must be trained, show his
fitness, and be commissioned or ordained, before he can
become a recognised minister in any of the Free Churches.
It is worth hammering at this because it is so important
to establish in general knowledge that most hopeful fact
that Churchmen and Nonconformists hold the same
principles as to the Christian ministry. And it is
necessary to labour the point, because both, but specially
the latter, are so ready to deny it.
They are more keen to parade some alleged great

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 137
and vital difference between their principles and those of
the Church than to make any attempt to show what the
differences are. They even get a little excited and in
coherent in denouncing sacerdotalism and priestcraft,
and declaring themselves free from such things. But
with all their eloquence these facts remain, and entirely
to their credit for devoutness and common sense ; that
they have a ministerial class which they hold in high
honour and carefully train ; that they regard these
ministers, like the Church does its clergy, as first called
by God, then tested, accepted, and commissioned, and so
solemnly set apart to be wholly devoted to God's service,
and pro tanto as differing from all who are not so set
apart ; that they strictly confine the administration of
the sacraments to these ministers, and also all the chief
" ministrations of the Word, " though, also like the
Church of England, they permit and encourage lay
preaching. Such then is this ministry, a great and remarkable pheno
menon in the Christian world, all the more remarkable
because of its quite recent growth. How enormous that
growth is the Church of England does not perhaps realise.
The various and now reuniting branches of Methodism
alone claim to number thirty millions. The Free
Church Catechism claimed in 1898 to contain a digest
of the belief of sixty million Christians. What are
we to think and say of the ministry of this enormous
number — a ministry which, however, has no connection
with the historic Episcopate of Christ's Church ? It is a
grave and momentous question.
In the Free Church Catechism we read (Questions
39 and 40) : " Who is a Christian minister ?
" A Christian minister is one who is called of God and
of the Church to be a teacher of the Word, and a pastor
of the flock of Christ.

138 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
" How may the validity of such a ministry be proved ?
" The decisive proof of a valid ministry is the sanction
of the Divine Head of the Church, manifested in the
conversion of sinners and the edification of the Body of
Christ." Theologically we may regard the first of those two
answers as inadequate, though it might be stretched to
cover the whole ground, or it might be urged that its
implications taken with what it explicitly states will
suffice. But what shall we say to the second reply ? The
first ministerial principle of the Church, that the call
and appointment of the officer rests with the Sovereign
Power in the Church, forbids our questioning the fact
that acceptance by our " Divine Head " is the decisive
proof of a valid ministry. And if a ministry shows,
especially if it shows continuously and on a large scale,
power to convert heathen and sinners, and power to
edify the faithful, can it be doubted that such a ministry
is accepted, employed, and blessed by the Divine Head ?
It is vain for us to attempt to urge the superior
doctrinal position of the Church unless we show our
selves quite honest and frank, simple and ingenuous.
These conversions, that edifying, that wonderful zeal and
success in foreign mission work, " Is it from heaven or of
men ? " We incur danger if we reason among ourselves
before making answer to that question. It is difficult to
think that it admits of any doubt. And if we say " from
heaven," why, then, do we not believe it, and confess simply
and even gladly that it is indeed so, and that we regard it
as being an accepted ministry ? It is chosen and set apart
for " the ministry of the Word and Sacraments " ; and who
questions that in this twofold work it is blessed by God ?
But that word " Sacraments " brings us to another con
sideration. According to an unchanging principle of the
Catholic Church, a valid ministry is necessary for the

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 139
validity of the sacraments it administers. What are we
to think, then, of the sacraments administered by this
Nonconformist, non-Episcopal ministry; are they valid
or invalid ? It is easy to reply that they are the latter,
but it is not so easy to face the consequences that ensue.
Are all these millions of devout and earnest Christians,
whose zeal in good works is beyond dispute, as is also
their faith and devotion, are they all unnourished, un-
strengthened, and unrefreshed by the Bread of Life ? Is
each one of these making growth in holiness, though all
the time neither he nor any of those associated with him
have any sacramental union with Christ ? It may be
replied that they have their baptismal gift, and that the
efficacy of baptism does not depend on the ministerial
position of the officiant. But does that help ?
It is worth while to remember that this is the line
taken by some Roman divines in their controversy with
the Church of England on the point of her orders and
their validity. Face to face with the very great devotion
of life and saintliness of English Protestants, Cardinal
Manning took this line. I will not quote again the
passage already quoted,1 but I will continue it two
sentences further. '' Moreover I have received into the
Church I know not how many souls in whom I could find
no trace of mortal sin. They were evidently in the grace
of their baptism." But that view does not seem to ad
vance matters satisfactorily. Logically it implies that
a valid ministry is only necessary for the validity of one
sacrament, namely, the Holy Communion, as any layman
or heretic can perform a valid Baptism. And then what
follows ? That only one Sacrament, namely Baptism, is
necessary for spiritual life and growth ; not a little feeble
1 See passage from Cardinal Manning's memorandum as to the
obstacles which prevented the spread of the Church of Eome in
England — quoted on p. 27.

140 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
growth, but a vigorous growth to great holiness. But
that is not a view which the upholders of Catholic prin
ciples can admit. If it were a case of a few honest and
sincere but misguided enthusiasts, who for a short time
were able to make spiritual progress without the Sacra
ment of Our Lord's Body and Blood, it would not be a
great difficulty- We could argue that these were ex
ceptional cases ; that God's laws bind us, but not Him ;
and that He can and does give grace outside the orderly
methods of His Church. But when exceptions amount
to millions and continue for generations, then the rule is
invalidated ; it ceases to be a rule. It is so riddled that
it holds no water, and becomes a mere difficulty, some
thing which we have to try and explain away and yet
retain. We can no longer say with any cogency that there are
" two sacraments generally necessary to salvation,'1 if we
know that there are millions attaining to salvation with
only one. Certainly the present writer cannot think
that such a position is compatible with the Church's view
about Sacraments. It would seem wiser and more
generous, and also more in harmony with the sacramental
teaching of the Church, to believe that all these devout
and holy people are being strengthened and refreshed by
that which is " Meat Indeed " and " Drink Indeed." It
is hard to believe that such people desiring earnestly to
frequent the Table of the Lord never in truth get beyond
a kind of mirage of it. It is true, no doubt, that in many
cases their doctrine of this Sacrament is defective, that
there are aspects of it which they do not see, or which
through misunderstanding they even deny. But the
defective doctrine of the communicant does not enter into
this question. If it did we should dispose of it briefly.
Whose doctrine and understanding is not defective ? To
whom in this Holy Feast does not God give such good

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 141
things as pass man's understanding; to whom does He
not communicate more than either they desire or deserve ?
But this point does not occur. It is the minister's compe
tence, not the people's position which is doubted. And
it would seem impossible to invalidate the Sacraments
of millions of true Christians unless you are prepared to
invalidate the Sacraments themselves as necessary means
of grace.
Cardinal Manning, driven by the exigencies of his
ministerial theories, was prepared to argue that the Holy
Communion is a dispensable means of grace, and that
people can advance to great holiness without it. He
became in fact what we may call " a One-Sacrament man."
But are English Churchmen prepared to follow him and
make this practical and serious. revision of the Catechism ?
But perhaps at this stage it would be well if we paused
and inquired what is really meant by saying that episco
pal ordination is necessary to the validity of the Sacra
ments. If, on the one hand, there is a gain in the use of
technical language, is there not also a certain risk ? We
use a technical word freely because we have often heard
it used, and believe it to have certain fixed connotations.
But we are not always at pains to ask what those conno
tations amount to. When a man says that he believes
that without episcopal ordination there is no valid cele
bration of the Holy Communion, what is intended to be
conveyed ? Is it meant that those who attend the Sacra
ment in faith and love go away having received no
benefit? That loyal and devout souls actually gather
round that sacred Board, and offer their humble and hearty
prayers and thanks to God, and then with hearts full of
love receive as appointed Bread and Wine, and depart
unblessed, unstrengthened — is that what is meant ? That
they actually do this again and again all through life, and
are not helped, not deepened in faith and hope and love,

142 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
are not swifter to do good, stronger to resist evil, more
spiritual, more tender, on account of their Lord's Supper
— is that what is meant ?
Take a Scotch Sacrament Sunday. Watch the con
gregation gathering together : those strong shrewd men
some of whom have walked miles in their "black" and
the white tie — their own unchangeable ritualism — and
those grave solemn women. They have made deliberate
preparation. There has been much thought, prayer,
study, self-examination. Look at their faces, their
attitudes. Look how, when it is over, their mien and
carriage are solemnised, impressed with the stamp and
mark which no human power can impress. Now about
those men and women ; — has their sacrament conveyed to
them no grace because their minister, to whatever Kirk
he belongs, is not episcopally ordained ? Is that what is
meant when it is said that this Sacrament is not valid
unless administered by one in episcopal orders? Because
if that is what is meant it cannot trouble anyone. It is
so palpably contrary to the facts- — so much so, indeed,
that it is difficult or impossible to believe that anyone
could make such an assertion ; and I do not know that
they do.
Nor does it seem to mend matters to advance the idea
that though these people receive some grace, that they
do not receive all that they would have in the other
circumstances. That does not help the case ; because it
is to be imagined that no one ever yet received at any
celebration, or series of celebrations, all the grace that he
might have received. If the celebrant's orders were all
right, there was some dimness of faith, coolness of love,
dullness of hope, carelessness of penitence, failure of
thanksgiving, some element of self, which prevented the
perfect consummation. So that to say that these Scotch
men and women went away blessed, but not fully blessed,

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 143
is only to say they were men and women. But they went
away loving Jesus a little more; realising a little less
imperfectly His Love for them and what their Redemp
tion cost. They went away stronger to resist sin, readier
to serve. They went away more sure of the reality of
their faith and the things in which they believe ; of God's
presence in the world and in their lives. They went
away comforted, purified, strengthened, and refreshed,
more ready and able to bear about in the body the dying
of the Lord Jesus, less tied to earth, more fit for heaven.
It would not do, of course, to say that they were all
like this. Some went for form's sake, some because it
was easier to go than to stay away. And some went too
full of thoughts of care or joy or business to receive
Him, or with hearts hardened by a grudge; or they
were worldly and frivolous. Not all, then, were blessed
by having been to the Sacrament. But, then, that is true
of any large congregation, anywhere, with any minister,
Pope, Patriarch, or Archbishop. But if the Sacrament
brings such grace to those who attend it aright, even
though their minister be not episcopally ordained, it
is not their Sacrament that you can indict. And if
there be some sense in which this great Sacrament is
invalid though it is so full of grace, it is not likely that
they will trouble about that invalidity either. Nor, I
humbly believe, need we. I do not think this idea of the
invalidity of the Nonconformist sacraments will carry us
very far. As regards Baptism there is no question ; but
is there any real serious question about their celebrations
of the Holy Communion either? Dropping technical
language about validity or invalidity, is there anyone
who seriously doubts that those who attend the Holy
Sacrament in Nonconformists' churches receive grace and
blessing in proportion to the faith and love, penitence
and thankfulness, with which they come ? And that being

144 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
clear, what is left to which the word " invalid " can in this
connection be applied ? There are, indeed, grave draw
backs connected with this ministry, and still more grave
objections to the principles which underlie its origin, but
it is impossible to think that the Sacraments which it
administers are void, or that they do not give grace
and sustain spiritual life.
It would seem, then, that we must lay aside our pre
possessions and prejudices, and believe quite simply that,
whether technically valid or not, this non-episcopal
ministry is a ministry dispensing sacraments which help
and strengthen the recipients, and that it is accepted and
blessed by the Divine Head of the Church.
But it will not follow, it does not follow, that we
should abandon our method of ordination or regard their
departure from the truly catholic doctrine and the
Divine provision of the Episcopate as a small matter. To
take any step which would weaken episcopacy or imply
that for the sake of peace we can part with it as our
ordaining ministry, or even act as though we thought
the one way as good as the other, would be to inflict a
very serious injury, not only on the Church, but on Non
conformity. The Episcopate is a Divine gift to the
Church. It is not one of our differences which we may
sink. It is not ours at all. There are a few points of
difference, as I have indicated elsewhere, which are ours.
These we may sink, and gladly would, to bring us nearer
reunion ; but the Episcopate is not ours any more than,
for instance, Infant Baptism or Confirmation are ours.
Nonconformity does not want the Episcopate yet. It is
not ready for it yet. But it will want it, will be ready
for it, and we must preserve it inviolate, as something we
hold in trust not only for our own spiritual children, but
for the whole of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. To give it
up because Nonconformists do not now want it, and

THE NON-EPISCOPAL MINISTRY 145
therefore find it to be a barrier in the way of reunion,
would be a very hasty step to take; and to accept the
non-episcopal ordination as having the same Divine
sanction and assurance of efficiency as episcopal ordina
tion would be the expression of a shallow judgment, and
one manifesting no real grasp or due understanding of
the Nonconformist position in regard to the Episcopate —
a subject which we must now investigate.

CHAPTER XIII
THEORIES OF THE CHURCH, AND THEIR
RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE
Chuechmen have not been in the habit of studying Non
conformists' theology, and therefore it is not surprising
that there are points in it which they have missed. This is
naturally true in a special manner of those matters in
regard to which they themselves have not given much
attention, which is the case with the Episcopate.
They took up a position towards it of great and bitter
hostility and entire rejection. But they have, to the
best of my belief, never worked out the subject very
carefully, and therefore to this day that position has not
quite been understood in one of its most important
features. The attitude of the early Nonconformists
towards not only the Episcopate, but towards all
questions concerning the ministry, was very largely
determined by their conception of The Church. In
Elizabeth's reign Puritans who began to separate from
the Church were dominantly Presbyterian. But Presby-
terianism proved too sacerdotal for England ; and before
long it recrossed the Border and became confined to the
Scotch, whom it suited very well. Its strong priestly
discipline, its underlying mysticism, and definite sacra
mental system are either unwelcome or unintelligible to
the English mind. This left the field clear for the
Independents, who, different as were and are their views
on certain questions, were at one about the nature of the
146

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 147
Church. Their theory of it is entirely congregational, as
mentioned incidentally above; but it is necessary now
perhaps to be rather more precise and full. Here, then,
is a statement of the theory of the Church as understood
and accepted by Congregationalists: "Those thus called
through the ministry of the Word by His Spirit He
commanded to walk together in particular societies or
Churches." "To each of these Churches thus gathered according
unto His mind, declared in His Word, He hath given all
that power and authority which is in any way needful
for their carrying on that order in worship and discipline
which He hath instituted for them to observe."
"These particular Churches thus appointed by the
authority of Christ . . . are each of them, as unto
those ends, the seat of that Power which He is pleased to
communicate to His saints in this world, so that as such
they receive it immediately from Him."
" Besides these particular Churches there is not insti
tuted any Church more extensive or catholic, entrusted
with power for the administration of His ordinances, or
the execution of any authority in His Name."
And this is no part-held theory, the consequences of
which are not fairly faced and accepted. On the contrary,
its conclusions are rigidly applied. Take this as an
example : " The powers of Censures being seated by Christ
in a particular1 Church is to be exercised only towards
particular members of each Church respectively, as such ;
and there is no power given by Him to any Synods or
Ecclesiastical Assemblies to excommunicate."
Again, we read : " The New Testament authorises every
Christian Church [i.e. each congregation] to elect its own
1 It is perhaps worth noticing that this word " particular " here
and in the above passages, is the equivalent of "individual" or
" each separate," and comes to mean " local" — the Christian congre
gation of each place.

148 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
officers [i.e. to appoint and ordain its own ministers], to
manage its own affairs, and to stand independent qf, and
irresponsible to, all aidhority; saving that only of The
Supreme and Divine Head of the Church, The Lord Jesus
Christ." And again : " No union of Churches has any right or
power to interfere with the faith or discipline of any
Church." Now this view of the Independents constitutes the
largest existing barrier between them and the Church of
England. It makes entirely impossible and inadmissible
the whole conception of the Catholic Church ; but among
other lesser effects it has this — it leaves no place, room,
or reason for the existence of any Episcopate. An
official or minister in any way corresponding to a Bishop
cannot exist in connection with these absolutely autono
mous, self-sufficing local congregations. And it is to
this theory of the Church far more than to any other
cause, that the decisive rejection of the Episcopate by the
Puritans and seventeenth-century Nonconformists must be
attributed. A number of torpedo boats, each entirely
managed by its own crew, who elect their officers, and with
those officers settle all their own movements, equipment,
and plan of action, would not more decisively reject the
idea of an Admiral than these local Churches reject a
Bishop. He could not possibly have any raison d'etre.
But it is by no means certain that such a view of
the Church can be permanent. Certainly, on the
showing of Congregationalists themselves, it quickly and
entirely faded away in the early days of Christianity.
As soon as Christianity began to realise its imperial
destiny, and not only to gather in the nations, but
to feel the full force of the world-powers' resistance,
then we find, not Congregationalism, but Catholicism.
A very great number of scholars, historians, and investi-

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 149
gators have always believed, and still believe, that
Catholicism was present from the beginning, and that
the signs of what may appear to be Congregationalism
in the New Testament do not really tell in that
direction. They would urge that Acts xv. does not
look as if in Apostolic days no synod or ecclesiastical
assembly larger than a local Church had power over
the local congregations. But I am not pressing or
arguing that issue now and here. The point is that,
even if simple Congregationalism occupied the ground
at one time in the Church, it disappeared completely
and very early, unable to hold its ground anywhere,
because unable to cope with the situation, as soon
as Christianity began to fulfil its purpose. Congrega
tionalism may have been the rudimentary form, but
by an organic development, not a corruption, it passed
everywhere into substantially the same form of episcopal
Catholicism. And no one can question that this change —
if change there were — was a providential one. Nothing
but Catholicism could have subdued the Roman Empire,
borne the shock of the Pagan reactions, won the allegiance
of the barbarian hordes which flooded and devastated
Europe. In like manner nothing but Catholicism could
have faced feudalism on equal terms and forced upon
it those factors which in due time produced progress
and liberty. And as for the external, so for the
(perhaps) even more critical internal problems of
Christianity. Nothing but Catholicism could have faced,
exposed, and conquered the destructive tendencies of
such heresies as Arianism,1 and safeguarded the Christian
1 The profoundest student of Arianism has shown us that Arianism
was in essence, and would therefore have been in result, had it
obtained the victory, " a step back into paganism. So with all the
other heresies of this period. Their victory would have meant the
destruction of the Christian faith." See Prof. Gwatkins' "Studies of
Arianism" and recent articles in the Camb. Mediaeval Hist., vol. i.

150 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
doctrine of the Godhead for all succeeding ages; and
nothing but Catholicism could have settled the canon
of Scripture and given Christendom the Bible. That
at length the very completeness of its success introduced
into it unworthy and corrupting elements, which did
not and do not belong to it; that some influence of
pagan magic crept into its use of the Sacraments ; that
some infection of the feudal spirit was absorbed by
its chief ministers — these and other failures should not
blind us to the fact that Catholicism proper deserves all
that Dr. Horton says * of it. No number of local con
gregations, each autonomous, self-sufficing, and confident
that there was " not instituted any church more extensive
or catholic entrusted with any power " could have solved
these problems or resisted these attacks. It was not then
a corruption, but a development and evolution to a higher
form if, as some doubtfully aver, Catholicism did replace
an early congregationalist system, similar to that which
in their recoil from prelacy and the corrupted Catholic
system, some sixteenth-century divines set up in England.
It is a legitimate question, then, to ask and natural
to consider, whether on any showing, even on their own
reading of history, the present view and the polity
founded on it can be permanent. And this question
comes with the more force just now because of a most
interesting, remarkable and quite recent development in
the Nonconformist ministry.
In one of their older but still valid declarations we
read : " The only officers placed over the individual
Churches are the pastors and the deacons, and to these
is committed respectively the administration of its
spiritual and temporal concerns." The words "over
the individual churches " appear to be a limitation, but
they are not. For " the individual churches " are the
1 Page 88.

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 151
only institutions which have rightful existence, and
therefore their officers or ministers will be the only
officers or ministers that can have rightful existence.
But quite recently a great deal of movement has been
going on in the various Nonconformist bodies. They
are full of life and vigour, and the work they are doing
and their skill in organisation, which is so great, is
leading to new developments in many directions. The
Free Church Council, whose Catechism has already
been quoted, is the main wheel in discerning what is
needed, and how that need can best be supplied.
During the last few years they have felt the want of
a new kind of ministry, and have taken one of their
very best and ablest men, Rev. F. B. Meyer, to see
what can be done. His report as given in the Free
Church Year Book for 1910 is the best possible descrip
tion of what has come into being and the reasons for it.
He says : " I am more and more impressed with the
extreme urgency of the work I am trying to do. . . .
My visits have not only gathered noble audiences . . .
but have enabled me to tighten the machinery and
quicken the pace, where necessary." "There ought to
be a subdivision of the country into at least four great
groups of churches, each with its competent Free Church
Bishop, who would do for each something of the work
which, amid many limitations, I have been trying to
do for all. It would not be impossible for four of our
leading ministers to undertake such a cure, not of soids,
bid of churches,1 if such a subdivision were carried out.
Let the Free Church Bishop be assisted by an inner
council of the leading men of his province, . . . and
this great piece of ecclesiastical and interdenominational
machinery would leap forward in a fresh lease of power
in its great service to our churches."
1 Italics are mine. — J. H. G.

152 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
Nonconformity has discovered its need of the Episco
pate. Notice first of all that the proposition is that this
new office or ministry shall be permanent. The experi
ment has been tried, and the very wise and capable
trier is " more and more impressed with the extreme
urgency of the work," and desires and recommends that
he forthwith be multiplied by four, "that this great
piece of ecclesiastical machinery may leap forward in its
great service to the churches." These new ministers
will be, neither " pastors " nor " deacons " ; they will have
" a cure, not qf souls, but of churches," and their chief work
will be, not to appear on great occasions and address noble
audiences, but to tighten up the machinery where a
church is slack, and to quicken its pace where it has got
slothful ; or, in other words, to exercise the discipline
of the whole body over the various local branches of it.
It is the passing of the Congregationalist theory that
each local congregation is autonomous, self-sufficing, and
justified in regarding as interference any regulation
of its life and affairs from without. It implies the
existence of a greater body, of which the smaller are parts,
and to which they are accountable for all failures which
work harm to the common well-being. In a word, it
is the expression of the Catholic ideal in and through
the Catholic minister. It is doubtless true that there
will be no coercive legal power behind him. But in
a spiritual body discipline is not best or most effectively
applied by coercion, whether legal or of any other sort.
It is the clear expression of the spiritual conscience of
the whole body that such and such a condition is below
the true standard, gives pain, checks the pace of advance,
does not glorify God — in a word, has the nature of sin — it
is the kind but direct expression of that, by which discipline
is best maintained and is the Bishop's most effective goad.

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 153
At present everything connected with this new
ministry is quite young. It does not know what it can
do or be. But the spectacle of these four Free Church
Bishops, each surrounded by his synod and exercising the
discipline of the whole upon the parts ; bringing the
encouragement, the wider thought, the varied experience,
the steadier faith and zeal of the entire body to the
service of the constituent members ; keeping them
together ; making each know the wants of others — in
a word, expressing the essential unity of the Church —
should fill us with joy and hope. True, at present
there is no connection between this new ministry and
ordination, but that too is a natural evolution. For
as the conception of the essential unity gains ground,
it will be seen that the question of the ministry is one
which belongs, not to any locality, but to the whole body ;
and the lead in regard to all matters connected with
it will pass naturally to the minister whose office both
embodies and represents the unity. That does not
mean that the people shall have no say about their
ministers. It is a very ancient and catholic practice
that they should. It was the people who chose " The
Seven " for the Apostles to ordain. St. Ambrose passed
from being a catechumen to the episcopate in a week
at the people's choice. But no "local officer" ordained
him, because ordination has so much more than merely
local interest and bearing. It affects vitally the whole
body. It does not follow, then, that in their discovery of their
need for Bishops, and their efforts to supply that want,
that Nonconformity has yet felt or found all that it needs
Bishops for, or all the uses to which they can be put.
But it is important to point out that this new kind of
minister, those Free Church Bishops, could have just that
part in ordination which they take in the Church, without

154 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
contravening any of the Nonconformist principles of the
ministry. There would be the same need of the personal
call, the same acknowledgment by the people, the same, but
more forcibly expressed, ratification by the Church, the
same commission and empowering in the Divine Name.1
But there is another reason that leads an onlooker to
wonder rather anxiously whether the theory of Inde
pendency about the nature of the Church will meet
present needs. It appears as if it were about to be tried,
not only by the test of growth and expansion, but much
more seriously.
The last twenty or thirty years has seen a very general
abandonment of old standards of doctrine and practice ;
and up to the present nothing has appeared to take their
place. To Independency especially Calvinism was much more
than a formative influence. With its systematic theology
it acted as a recognised authority ; 2 and as such it exer
cised a restraint upon speculation, allowing little to arise,
while in cases of dispute or of doctrinal divergence it
was something definite to which appeal could be
made. Moreover, there existed what we may call the Non
conformist fathers, the great divines of their early days,
quotations from whose works carried weight and had
something of the force of Responsa Prudentum in ancient
Rome. But these also have for the most part gone as
1 It is just possibly useful to remark that neither the present system
of patronage, nor " the parson's freehold," nor the very small actual
share that the people take (their rights, however, are fully acknowledged)
in the matter of who shall be ordained, are either Church or Catholic
principles. Some of them call for serious alteration, and in many branches
of the Anglican Communion they do not exist.
2 It will be hardly necessary to point out that my reason for saying
" to Independency especially" is that its theory of entirely indepen
dent congregations made such an authority more useful than it would
have been had an authoritative Catechism or " Confession " binding
on all been possible.

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 155
authorities — gone with the Calvinism on which they were
based. Such breaches with the past must always entail loss
and uncertainty for a time. Authorities are matters of
growth; they cannot be manufactured, especially in re
ligious bodies, as history shows ; and until new ones have
been tested and received, there must be a period when
the body has to get on without any or with only impaired
authorities. That is bound to be a time of danger — the
danger of confusion and extravagance of thought. Freed
from the restraint imposed upon it by the existence of
received standards, the growth of opinion is unchecked,
and there is nothing with which to compare it or by
which to correct it. So the vagaries of individuals and
the attraction which novelties have for some minds, just
because of being novelties, have great powers of unsettle-
ment. The winds blow cross and strong from every
direction, and at such a time " a withered leaf will soar
like a hawk," and some poor dried-up old heresy will
mount aloft as if it had angel's wings.
But it is not the loss of Calvinism alone which has
brought about the unsettlement, because that was only
one anchor. There was another, even more important,
the Bible, to which all referred as final. But the out
growing of Calvinism has 'taken place about the same
time as the rejection of the theory of verbal inspiration.
The result is that a double loss occurs at the same
moment. If Calvinism be no longer a court of appeal,
neither is the Bible, or if it be, it is a court where
each man claims that the verdict is in his favour.
Most of the early Reformers believed that the Bible
was verbally inspired, and that it was not possible for
1 Are not the trust-deeds of many chapels obsolete and defunct
for the same reason ? They also, but for this, might have had a re
straining influence.

156 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
honest men of intelligence to differ as to its meaning,
at all events for more than a very short time. Con
sequently an appeal to the Bible would, they believed,
settle every dispute. Once let people read and know
their Bibles, and agreement was certain. All discords,
except those of wilful heresy for interested motives, would
cease, and the pure word of God would take the place
of the corrupt Papacy. There is something pathetic in
the complete failure of this faith to realise itself. And
how long men clung to it ! Long after experience had
shown that to read and know the Bible did not bring
unity, for each body claimed that the Bible as supporting
its own views, the idea of the verbal inspiration continued
in full force. It was some comfort to feel that though
human perversity was too stubborn to yield, the Divine
Book was unquestionable from verse to verse, " without
seam, woven from the top throughout."
This view of Holy Scripture, moreover, though it did
not settle disputes between different bodies of Christians,
confined speculation and the varieties of opinion in each
communion within very reasonable limits. The idea of
verbal inspiration, when combined with a strong systematic
" corpus " of theology like Calvinism, and the authority
of the " doctors," who were its authoritative exponents,
constituted a court of appeal, always ready to give a
prompt verdict, and leaving very few questions "open."
Its principles and code, too, were so well known that
offences and trespasses were few and not very audacious.
It did not seem any use breaking out when condemna
tion swift and sure was inevitable. But now all has
gone at once — Calvinism, the "fathers," and a Bible
inspired in every jot and tittle. To-day everyone knows
that the Bible is a very composite book, with human
portions full of mistakes — wrong dates, names, numbers,
events, readings, sayings — with teaching earthly, fallible,

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 157
and therefore outlived, all blended with what is divine,
perfect, and abiding. What one quotes to prove himself
right another dismisses as a gloss, or the addition of
a late redactor, or urges that it is not sound to press the
partial morality or limited view of a by-gone day too far, or
to rest too much on a single text very strictly construed.
This altered view of the Bible is of course felt every
where. We are all with the critics more or less ; and
everywhere the same results are to be seen. The air
is full of new things. You can hardly read any book
about Christianity, or even religion, without being intro
duced to a novelty. There is " the new view of religion,"
the "new theology," a new Christ who is not Jesus,
or a new Jesus who is not Christ, and even a new God
who is only immanent. If Hume had been alive now,
he would have found that his view about miracles, so
far from being atheistic, was the last word of the highest
and most spiritual form of cultured Christianity, giving
its exponents almost patristic authority. And most
dangerous of all, hundreds who never read a line of
the old theology are quite sure that it is all wrong.
This is " in the air," and everyone is affected by it ;
some hurrying forward, some in reaction harking back,
others very puzzled, distressed, elated, bored, or dejected.
Even the Church of Rome has its Modernists and its
higher critics, and though most of them have been
cast out or silenced, the movement which produced them
continues. Certainly in the Church of England they
are very busy, and very untrammelled. But we are
not so specially anxious in the Church, because, though
the consequences of the changed idea about the Bible are
being felt among us very strongly, we have our shelters
from the storm. There are, for instance, the Creeds,
our Prayer Book, the Sacraments. We may hear a
sermon which is all novelties that we believe to be

158 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
wrong; but we are not much disturbed. We have
just said the Nicene Creed. Presently the preacher will
give us the Bread of Life in the old way, with the old
beautiful prayers and thanksgivings, and we shall go
away with the peace of God in our ears, and even in
our hearts. We have a strong conviction, based on a
long history, that ages after the novelty which we dislike
has been forgotten, our spiritual descendants will be
still saying the same Nicene Creed, and receiving the
same Blessed Sacrament. But what of Christians who
have no Creeds, no liturgy, no sacramental system, and
who recognise no Church more extensive or catholic
than the local congregation ? Can they wear through
such a period ? Can Independency bear such a strain ?
It has never yet been tested by having to face the results
of a great expansion in numbers simultaneous with such
internal upheaval and unrest. Its younger ministers
especially, who naturally feel the full force of every wind
that blows, and have no anchor down like the older men,
by what are they to test the various theories and ideas,
often very specious or attractive, which claim their
support ? There is no authority, no standard of com
parison, no touch-stone by which to test the novelties,
no shelter from the winds. And the effect is being seen
and felt as a great disintegrating force. If the minister
of some congregation preaches the very strangest doctrines,
provided his congregation are satisfied, it must be re
membered that "no union of Churches has any right
or power to interfere with the doctrine or discipline of
any Church." This, the primary article of Independency,
is explicit, and how weak and unfit to cope with a
period of great unsettlement !
In point of fact, it seems as if we were already back
again in the atmosphere of the third and fourth centuries.
Then from the contact of Christianity with Greek

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 159
thought and speculation, the whole faith was put into the
crucible. Faced by this great and, to it, new intellectual
force, Christianity had to justify and explain itself. For
the thinking world of those days immediately began to
work at it and explain it ; and the Church had to refuse
many too subtle or over hasty or unworthy explanations of
itself and its truth which were constantly being put for
ward on its behalf by thinkers who were more Hellenist
than Christian in spirit. These thinkers were sincerely
interested, and meant to be helpful and friendly. They
were trying to show the Church that they understood her
and her faith, her God, her Jesus Christ, her Holy Spirit
better than she did. They did not want or intend to
destroy her ; they were only interpreting and explaining.
So the great heresies arose, which, despite their friendly
intention, would have been deadly in effect had she not
resisted. There is not a little in our present position that
reminds one of those days. This great new world of
modern thought, which has just become adolescent, is
intensely interested in Christianity. It is too acute and
scientific, its methods are too sound, not to feel how
vital and important Christianity is. Now that Science
has got over its absorption in physical things, it sees
that Christianity is the most important phenomenon
in the world of thinking men. It wants to make some
thing of it. It is quite sure that the old theology is
absurd. The old views are silly and obsolete. "You
can't," it is always saying, " think of God like that, or
Christ or Man, or miracles, or Resurrection. You must
let psychology teach you, and biology too, and compara
tive mythology. And you must look on all these things
in the light of evolution, and think of what geology and
anthropology have established." Hence the new religion
and the new God and the new Jesus and the new soterio-

160 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
logy for an old Adam, very old indeed, but without
sin. It is a time of such sifting and testing as those most
critical early centuries were. And already some of the
ideas which then tried to find lodgment in the Church
are abroad again, in the same suave, kindly spirit.
That makes ours no age for Independency. You want
something close-knit, massive, united. You want the
steadiness and the slow, deliberate wisdom that belongs
to a large body ; something that cannot be rushed as a
single congregation can by the influence of one man, or
a mood of enthusiasm for a new cause presented with
glamour. You want the judgment that is informed by
the knowledge and intelligence of a large number of
people, living under different conditions and experiences,
able therefore in the aggregate to bring a matured criti
cism armed at all points to bear on some hotly championed
project. It was only so that Christianity won through
those centuries of trial. " We all stand together" — that
was the dominant idea, and it proved the right one in the
hour of need. When one group faltered, the others, not
subjected to the same influence, were steadfast. If the
West missed a point which might have undone Christi
anity, the East saw it. Independency may do for the
day of small things and for quiet times of fixed opinion
like the eighteenth century and the nineteenth up to (say)
theseventies. But will it dofor the twentieth? Thequestion
is asked anxiously and with sympathy by one who believes
in the essential solidarity of all English Christianity. It
would seem as if growth and expansion had already
proved the insufficiency of the congregational theory.
But will not the period of storm and stress as to faith
and doctrine into which we have passed, still more fully
show its weakness ?
And if the doctrine of the Church held by Inde-

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 161
pendency passes away, and is replaced by a conception of
the unity of the whole body, then the attitude of this large
communion of Nonconformists towards a virtual, if not a
nominal, episcopate will be fundamentally changed. The
new ministry initiated by Mr. Myers will find itself more and
more needed, and will develop usefulnesses now undreamt of.
But it may be asked if any body of Christians can
under any circumstances evolve the Episcopate, however
much they may desire and need it. We have in the
Church been used to regard it as among the greatest of
Christ's direct gifts, a very precious legacy. Our whole
attitude towards the matter of ordination and succession
has been based on this belief. Consequently any idea
that a body of Christians, who, for any reason whatever,
have departed from and rejected this gift, evolving it, as
it were, for themselves, is a difficult, and for some a repug
nant thought. They would be inclined to say that an
Episcopate so evolved could not be genuine. It would
be a man-made, man-derived, man-descended ministry,
different in kind, though it might usurp the name and
functions, from the Episcopate given by Christ.
Yet on that there seem to be two observations worth
making. First, there are insuperable difficulties about a
belief that anything which is wisely and rightly devised
for the better service of God is man-made. Every real
advance in true efficiency of service, wiser organisation,
the more complete fulfilment of the needs of the work ;
every fault made good, every gap filled, every approach
to the right model, must be God-guided, God-given. If,
then, in this evolution and development of their ministry
the Free Churches are making their ministry and organi
sation more complete and efficient, and are approaching
nearer to what we in the Church believe to be the true
model, it must needs be because God is guiding them and
showing them the better way, and therefore their new

162 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
ministry is God-made, God-guided, and God-given. It is
impossible to see how any Christian of any school of
thought can doubt this, and it must colour our judgment
of such a development. And when we consider the
earnestness and self-sacrifice with which the Free Churches
try to perfect their organisation, with motives that we
have no right or wish to think other than the highest,
surely the surprise would be not that they should be, but
if they were not guided to take wise and right steps. It
seems, then, that it is more reverent and thoughtful to
welcome rather than to depreciate this great step which
has been taken.
Secondly, it may be worth while to look forward.
Imagine that some generations hence — not two or even
three, perhaps, but more — the needs of work and the
problems of doctrine have developed in Nonconformity a
ministry which now they have not, but which will be
practically the Episcopate. It will have, that is, as its
main function, to express and consolidate the ideal of
unity, and to bring to bear the mind and will of the
whole body on each local section. Together with these,
it will also discharge such other functions and duties as
would naturally fall to and be suggested by such a
ministry, including the oversight and direction of the
clergy. Imagine, further, that our prayers have been
heard and our efforts blessed, and that there has come,
first friendliness, then fruitful discussion, then approxi
mation as to doctrines and practices. Can it be believed
that in such circumstances the new Episcopate to which
Nonconformity has been led and the old Episcopate of the
Church will stand apart ? It could not be so. They would
most assuredly mingle and co-operate till there were not
two kinds of Bishop,but one, which all sections of Christians
held as the chief ornament of the Christian ministry.
But if these attempts to prophesy have led the

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 163
writer into what is uselessly visionary, this at least is
solid — that the new development of ministry among the
Free Churches has a direct bearing on our own immediate
action and duty. It shows us that no time could be less
opportune for even seeming to disparage our own Episco
pate in any way, or proposing any kind of departure
from our principles and practices as regards ordination.
It would be the height of unwisdom even to appear to
regard the Episcopate in any other light than that of an
integral part of our great inheritance, a Divine gift as
full of grace and power to the Church to-day as it has
ever been. Plainly the Free Churches are in a condition
of transition as to their ideas of the Church and of the
ministry. The abandonment of Calvinism has been ac
companied, as we have seen, by at least the beginnings of
an understanding of the value of true Catholicism. Much
also that was formerly detested or rejected is now being
regarded as good and helpful. There never was a time
then when the part of the Church of England in her
relation to Nonconformity was so clearly indicated. It
is a time not to abandon, but to fulfil, all that is truly
catholic in our heritage from the past, so that its
spiritual value may be manifest. Above all, we need to
strengthen and support the Episcopate, freeing it from
conditions that hamper its work. For we do not inherit
only catholic traditions and habits. There are connected
with our ancient sees not a little that has other origins,
and calls for remedy and removal ; so that the precious-
ness of Episcopacy as a spiritual gift may be evident to
all men.
Is this self-contradictory, confused and confusing, to
cling to episcopal ordination and insist upon it ; and yet
to confess frankly and gladly the worth and dignity of
the work done by a ministry not episcopally ordained ?
To what may be called " rigidarians," and to those who

164 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
think that you can reason about these matters in syllo
gisms, no doubt such statements will rouse contempt.
How cogent seems the argument : " You say Episcopacy
is necessary for ordination ; therefore an ordination in
which no Bishop has any part must be wrong, and a
ministry so ordained cannot be valid. If you admit its
validity, you can no longer stand for episcopal ordination.
You are bound to admit a Nonconformist minister who
desires to come not only to your communion, but to
celebrate at your altar."
The only reply to this impregnable logic is to say that
it rests upon a conception of God and God's ways of
dealing with man that neither the Bible nor the ex
perience of Christian centuries warrants. How often we
have to admit the force of St. Augustine's maxim, "Quod
non fieri debuit, factum valet." To the scholar or thinker
who works out the rules and laws of God in his study
and there applies them to the doings of men, Christian
history is full of anomalies as men judge such things.
But those who have learnt a little of God's ways, not in
books or by reasoning, but in the experience of direct
contact with human lives, have learnt to expect an inex
haustible tenderness and patience, which seem to recognise
no law or rule but that of a father. Think of the saintly
lives and the manifold beauty of character lived and
achieved by men and women, who without creed or sacra
ment have treasured some small fragment of the truth,
and rejected, it may be to the death, what we know to
be necessary means of grace. That does not mean that
there are no rules or laws in the kingdom of God, or
that sacraments and means of grace are negligible things.
But it means that in all these things man deals with
Fatherliness Absolute and Perfect, who reads hearts
and intentions, and, knowing the real direction of the
will, can afford, if we may dare the phrase, to make ex-

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 165
ceptions. He can discern an honest error of judgment,
even if it be mixed with some tinge of human egotism
and self-will, and He will bless it and reward it and
grant it more and more light if its desire to serve
Him be sound ; whereas a full and accurate knowledge
of His truth and laws which is self-contented with its
accuracy, and cold and disdainful to those who do not
share its science, will grow into no holiness as it goes the
round of all the means of grace. This does not mean —
God forbid ! — that a knowledge of His truth as perfect as
man can attain, is not a glorious thing. Still less that
it " does not matter what a man believes, so long as he
does his best " ; as if a very essential part of our best
was not a careful and sustained study of God's revelation.
But it does prepare us to find that He will accept and
bless work springing out of very imperfect and incorrect
views. The blessing is not given because the views are
imperfect. There is an imperfect knowledge which
springs from indifference, sloth, and self-complacency.
There are thousands of professing Christians who never
open a Bible or read a religious book, and fatuously de
clare that it does not matter what a man believes. Such
ignorance is sin, and the only blessing it can receive is
not God's furtherance, but pardon and conversion. But
there is often in those whose desire to know and serve
aright is most deep and true, much confusion of thought
and misunderstanding of His way, involuntary, perhaps
inherited, 'almost invincible ; and there, how often blessing
is given, not to the wrong thought, but to the right
desire ! Therefore it happens again and again that what
is mistaken is overruled, and what is irregular proves
itself possessed of power and grace.
" Lord ! we saw one casting out devils in Thy Name,
and we forbad him, for he followeth not us."1 How
1 St. Mark ix.

166 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
very natural ! Just then unity and fellowship were
so needed. The disciple who followed apart from
the rest failed both to give and receive help and power.
It is a serious thing to stand aside from the company
of those whom Christ has gathered round Him, and
no doubt when St. John said "us" ("he followeth not
us") he was not thinking of the disciples apart from
Jesus, but as His companions.1 The avoidance of them
was therefore the avoidance of Him. It was natural,
then, to forbid him. But there is a wisdom higher
that the natural, and He who possesses it says, " Forbid
him not." Our Lord does not commend the man's
separation ; but He appeals to the fact of power.
" Factum valet." No one can cast out devils except
by the Spirit of God. So with this non-episcopal
ministry : " factum valet." It has the power, which
declares its character — the power which proves that
God is with it. It is indeed sad, and a tremendous
loss to both parties, that " it followeth not with us."
But that will come if we are steadfast in faith and
charity. We shall be led by common work done in the
common Name to realise in fellowship our common
allegiance. There is in the life of Moses an incident which
seems so close a parallel that it may find a place here.
Moses had been commanded by God to call seventy
chosen men of Israel to assemble in the Tabernacle, that
there He might pour out His Spirit upon them there
for a much-needed national ministry. Sixty-eight
obeyed ; but two, Eldad and Medad, came not ; they
stayed where they were. Yet when the Spirit fell on
the sixty-eight in the Tabernacle, it fell also on Eldad
and Medad ; and the proof of its having done so was
1 St. Luke has, "he followeth not with us," ix., which makes this
clear.

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 167
that they prophesied in the camp. Such irregularity
and disobedience were too much for a young man, who
ran and told Moses. Joshua too, like St. John in
the gospel story, joined in with his indignant request,
"My lord Moses, forbid them." But that great saint
would not, convinced that Eldad and Medad were
really prophesying. He knew that the Spirit had
come to them also, and he rejoiced at the proof of
God's Presence with His people. Why they had not
come to the Tabernacle he knew not. But God who
knew had not judged them guilty of wilful disobedience
or rebellion, for He had not rejected them or with
drawn their call. That they ought to have gone to
the Tabernacle is certain. But it is not less certain
that whatever the cause of their not going, there were
not in it that defiance and self-assertion which make
men incapable of receiving God's gift. There could
not have been, for they were prophesying. Perhaps the
message had been so badly delivered that they had not
understood it. Perhaps it was given by so arrogant a
messenger that they could not believe that it really
came from God through Moses. Perhaps some accident
made it impossible for them to get to the Tabernacle.
Yet why speculate. "Factum valet." God accepted
them and made them His prophets.
So with this non-episcopal ministry of Nonconformity.
Irregular it is and disobedient it may seem. It abandons
much that we know to be holy, good, and of Divine
origin. Above all, it is marked by a refusal to come
up to the Tabernacle as God has commanded, and
imports confusion into the national ministry and service
of religion. These are patent facts and sad. Just when
unity is so needed, it neither gives nor receives the
power and help it might. But surely no less patent
is the fact that God has sent forth His Spirit upon it,

168 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
and that He and no other has given it life and
power. What shall be our conclusion then ? Not, surely,
that our Eldads and Medads'are right, still less that
we may follow their lead and give up, so as to bring
our practice into a line with theirs, things which God
has provided for us and called us to use. But that
with whatever mistake in doctrine and act, the motive
and intention of this great ministry have been such
as God blesses. Moreover, one cannot read their views
on this subject without feeling how great is their
misunderstanding, nor can one read history and not
feel how easy misunderstanding has been. If devout
and earnest men in the sixteenth century did recoil
from all that savoured of Catholicism as they knew
it, no one can wonder. There were corruptions very
glaring, evils very rampant, doctrines and institutions
very monstrous. One can sympathise with those who
felt they would retain nothing from the past. Yes,
sympathise even while one thanks God for His ordering
of events and for the patience, courage, and wisdom
of those among us who would let go nothing of their
heritage except what they felt was proved to be a
corruption. One feels how difficult it must have been
for even thoughtful and scholarly minds to take that
position, and still harder for them to explain and
defend it to men burning with indignation. It does
not need much imaginative sympathy to see how it
was that in a time such as the Reformation, with its
violence of resentment and reaction, God's message
was not very clearly delivered or thoughtfully received.
So there were Eldads and Medads who refused to assemble
at the Tabernacle, not defiant of God's command, but
unable to recognise it as His, or to believe that He
really desired them to return, as it seemed to them,

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 169
to the polluted shrine. Neither is it hard to under
stand, if one may reverently say so, why their motive
was acceptable and God gave them His Spirit, and
used them, and still uses them, far though many of
them are from His Tabernacle, to speak holy truths
to many in His Israel. That does not make their
action right for us. The Tabernacle is still the place
ordered by God, so that we cannot go elsewhere ; and the
things in it are made after the patterns given by God.
"There are the candlestick, and the Table, and the
shew-bread" as God appointed for His people. With
these things we cannot dispense, and we can use no
others. But it is a false zeal which for the honour
of the Church or the Episcopate would be glad to
forbid them or to hear that they were silenced, or
denies that their ministry is divinely blessed.
But we have not yet mentioned the strongest reason
why we cannot begin to remodel our ministry on that
of the Free Churches, or regard that non-episcopal
system as equivalent to our own. That reason is, that
the rejection of the Episcopate embodies a principle
which in the interests of all forms of Christianity we
are bound to combat, because if admitted it would
enormously increase the difficulty of faith, render the
destructive attack of unbelief much harder to resist, and
hinder reunion in the future.
The principle on which the English Puritan, like the
continental Reformers acted, was one of complete dis
continuity with the past. They took, as it were, a
sponge and wiped clean off the slate everything which
had been used, thought, or believed between their own
day and that of the Apostles. They retained nothing.
" Let us obliterate the past, and, Bible in hand, recon
struct Christian faith and polity as it was, in our
opinion, during the first age." That was their guiding,

170 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
dominant principle. At that time people were for the
most part too excited to examine principles quietly, and
this is particularly true of enthusiastic inventors of
principles. The result is that a good many very potent
forces were never calmly investigated, this Puritan
principle among them. Let us then analyse it.
It contains, first of all and on the face of it, an assertion
which, if true, would be among the most damaging to
Christian faith that could be imagined. Its primary
assertion is that in the Christian Church, as it had come
down to the Puritans, there was nothing worth pre
serving ¦ — no belief or creed, no prayer, no habit, no
institution, that was not so wrong and so bad that it
was the duty of a Christian man to cast it away. This
rejection was unlimited. It was not applied to recent
developments or institutions ; it was applied to every
thing, the oldest as well as the newest, without discrimi
nation. It swept away with the same enthusiastic
destruction novelties like the sale of indulgences and
transubstantiation, and practices and institutions which
went back beyond history like the Episcopate and Con
firmation, or those which belonged to the great ages of
the Church like the Nicene Creed. The Christian
Church contained nothing worth preserving, or, rather,
it was positive, not negative — it contained nothing but
what deserved to be destroyed. That was the Puritan
view of Christian history. It was in their eyes the story
of a vast corruption which set in at once and completely,
almost as soon as the Apostles died, leaving nothing
tolerable, nothing worth salvage. And so far as
Puritans still exist, it is their view still. A writer whom
I have already quoted more than once describes it thus :
" The new [i.e. primitive Christianity, the gospel of
Jesus Christ] was conquered by the old. The pure
stream, leaping from the utmost heights, fell into the

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 171
sluggish river below, to take its colour and to follow its
course." That is the Puritan view picturesquely ex
pressed. Falsehood was stronger than truth. The
world overcame the Spirit. God visited His people and
gave them the gospel in His Son. For a brief, bright
period and for a few persons in a small corner of the
world there was light. But soon the dark gathered
again, and the light was extinguished. From the second
century till the sixteenth, from the death of St. John till
the coming of Luther, the people who called themselves
Christians were in the dark; the Holy Spirit did not
guide them. They were wrong about their ministry,
wrong about their sacraments, wrong about the Church,
about their entire conception of worship, of a round of
feast and fast based on the earthly life of Jesus Christ,
wrong about the departed, wrong about the saints, wrong
about great and important matters like the authority of
the Oecumenical Councils and the belief that the Holy
Spirit was abiding in the Church to guide it into truth,
wrong about small matters like music and pictures and
architecture. The whole body of Christian people during
all those centuries were wrong about all matters of faith,
polity, doctrine, and practice. They were bereft of the
Spirit, and left in darkness to flounder on from error to
error. That, in brief, and without exaggeration was the
Puritan principle, and its rejection of Episcopacy is an
embodiment of that view of God's dealing with man
which we call Church or Christian history. The clean
sweep which Puritanism made, and its utter rejection of
all that had come down to it through the ages, could
only be, and can only be, justified on this ground. It
must mean that nothing of all that came down from the
past was God's will. That the creeds, the ministry,
the sacraments, doctrines, habits, uses, were none of

172 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
them after God's mind, none of them God's gift or
God's appointment, or due to the guidance of the Holy
Spirit. Against this principle the Church is bound to protest.
Not in its own interest (it cannot be too often said that
the Church has no interests of its own ; and the moment
it begins to think it has it begins to injure itself), but
in the interests of mankind and of faith, it is bound to
rebut a view of Church history which is not a view of
God's dealings with men, but of His abandonment of
them. There are, in fact, two possible views of Christian
history. One believes that from and as a consequence
of the Incarnation and the coming of the Holy Ghost,
there has been continuously in the world a number of
men and women gathered round our Lord and guided
by His Spirit. This body of people has been very
imperfect. It has always, even in the original Twelve,
included bad persons, and its best have been faulty.
Many in it have fallen into evil habits ; its leaders have
at times made alliances with the world, added to the
truth given to it errors and guesses of their own, and
caused it often to start aside like a broken bow. But
all through and all along the Light has never failed in
it ; its Guide has never left, as He promised with His
last words ; all along it has been doing His work,
nourishing His saints, extending His Kingdom, pre
serving His Revelation. The foundation on which He
built it, with Himself as Head corner-stone, has stood
fast, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it.
So as the ages go on, and the distance of time which
separates us from the days of the Son of Man grows
longer ; faith has not less, but more and more to build
on, as the miracle of continuous grace and guidance, and
the witness of the unfailing Presence of the Lord Himself
becomes more and more marvellous. That is one view

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 173
of Christian history. It sees room and cause for many
a reformation, but none of any break in continuity, or
clean sweep of the past and a fresh start.
The other view of Christian history is of a fair
and glorious morn, refulgent with promises of help and
guidance which were never fulfilled. Then quickly fol
lowed the advent of a long night, in which nothing
belonging to the day survived, and the children of the
night and of darkness moulded all things to their will.
Then, after this period of failure and darkness, in which
grace and guidance ceased, an obscure and troubled
dawn, a faint light which even now has not penetrated
into the regions where dwell three-fourths of all those
who call themselves Christians.
Between these two views of the course of God's deal
ings with mankind there is the sharpest possible
contrast, and those who hold the former have no doubt
as to its vitality. Already, as we have seen, the direct
spiritual descendants of the Puritans have abandoned
the idea of the complete and utter corruption of the
Catholic Church, even at the end of the Middle Ages ;
and every historian agrees with them. But while the
principle may be passing away, its expression and em
bodiment in such acts as the rejection of the Episcopate,
of Confirmation, of prayer for the departed, of the
necessity for Baptism, and the like negations survive.
And therefore, in regard to all these matters, there
is over and above the Tightness or wrongness of the
matter itself, the question of the principle embodied in
rejection or retention. It is so in this case. It is not
a mere question of Episcopate versus Presbytery, of
Apostolical Succession from those appointed by Our Lord
Himself versus a ministry evolved by a Christian body
to meet the needs of its life and work; but it is the
question of the continuity or discontinuity of grace and

174 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
guidance. If a man must believe that for fifteen out of
its nineteen centuries all the so-called people of God were
entirely mistaken about their ministry, their sacraments,
their worship, their creeds, and so on, and so on — in a
word, that His revelation was withdrawn from them, and
that it is withdrawn from three-quarters of them still,
and that even now it is only known to and understood by
Free Churchmen, and by them only with great differences
of opinion — then I think a man may fairly say that the
light of nature and civilisation will provide him with as
sure a guide.
But if he is told that there is no need to believe that —
for certainly Catholicism was a noble thing, misguided,
mixed up with rubbish, adulterated by infiltration of
pagan ideas, but in the main and essence a noble thing,
a great gift of God—and that, of course, the light never
failed, and grace and guidance never ceased, then I think
he will reply that in that case he will treasure above all
earthly possessions the great framework of doctrine and
practice, of polity and institutions, of faith and worship,
that came down to him through the ages in the Church.
He will treasure them as the signs and tokens of that
miraculous continuity of grace and guidance on which his
faith rests. And it is on that that our faith rests,
is it not ? We believe, not because a wonderful Man
lived and died and, as some think, rose again nineteen
hundred years ago ; but because that Man said, " Lo, I am
with you all the days," and He has made good His word.
We look down the centuries, and what a time we see !
No quiet calm, but volcanic centuries of revolution,
destruction, upheaval, new birth. In them great civilisa
tions, empires, races, languages are swept away. But all
through the Christian Society abides, in which, in spite of
its own wilfulness and corruption, He is ever visibly at
work, for in it grace and guidance never fail. We cling,

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 175
then, to all that represents and embodies that great fact,
the greatest fact in history, the greatest truth in every
Christian life. That is why the Episcopate and all that
goes with it are so inestimably precious. They are not
matters of organisation and structure, but a part of the
token, the framework, of that Society which witnesses to
the abiding presence among men of the Saviour of Mankind.
This is what, blest and accepted though it is, the
irregular ministry of Nonconformity loses. It cannot,
and does not claim, it almost glories in not claiming,
continuity. It is the ministry of discontinuity, of the
clean sweep, of the great rejection of this Christian
Society and all that it was and had. Nonconformity,
therefore, in its ministry loses the great support, but not
fully, because the Church keeps it alive for all Christian
people alike.
But if to make peace we in the Church of England
abandoned all this, and surrendered to the principle of
discontinuity, we should inflict on the Church of England
a fatal blow, and on Nonconformity through the Church
one hardly, if at all, less severe. The Nonconformist
sense of the value of continuity, only temporarily sus
pended, is fast returning. Science, history, criticism are
teaching everyone the vital necessity of continuity. We
are bound to hold fast this possession, which is not ours,
but mankind's, making manifest its spiritual nature and
value and the reality of our love for those who, in a
season of great stress and confusion, let it slip. It will
not be long, as the life of the Church goes, before they
will need it and turn to it, as indeed they already are
turning ; and then they will recognise that we preserved it
for them as well as for ourselves. They will see, too,
that a ministry which embodies the rejection of this
great principle, lacks a great force, a spiritual weight,
and suffers indeed from a serious defect.

176 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
No one can be more conscious than the present writer
that such views will please nobody. My Nonconformist
friends will be less glad to hear that their orders are
effective and blessed (of which they are already quite
sure) than they will be pained or hurt to hear that they
are irregular and seriously defective.
On the other hand, logical Churchmen, as are many of
my personal friends, will think that, safeguard it as one
may with the Quod non fieri debuit, the admission Factum
valet, which predicates for Nonconformity a ministry
which God accepts and which administers grace-giving
sacraments, is in some sort a blow to the Church and to
Episcopal ordination.
And it is indeed true that the views here expressed are
an accommodation — no neat, clean-cut, well-defined theory
stated in ten words and handy on a platform. They are
certainly rather laboured and intricate, each part requir
ing to be balanced by the others, long, and difficult to
express. But in extenuation may it not be urged that
just for this reason there may be some truth in them?
For are not all God's ways with us accommodations ? As
the shepherd after the strayed sheep goes by no direct
path, but zigzags here and there as he follows the tracks
of its aimless, purposeless wanderings, so God follows us.
He cannot give us grace, help, or gift in direct and simple
ways, because we cannot take them in that manner.
Human nature is not simple, but confused by sin. We
are tortuous beings at war with ourselves ; and if the
worst among us is not without good, the best is not without
flaw. Our motives, aims, and plans are all compounded
of little wisdom and much folly, much self-seeking and
little generosity. And God in His tenderness takes us as
we are, and gives to us His grace as we can and will receive
it. He accommodates Flimself to our condition, giving
always in spite of our self-will and assertiveness, yet forced

RELATION TO THE EPISCOPATE 177
by them to have a thousand ways of giving. So in
Church history, which, beginning in the Old Testament,
is the record of His direct dealings with men, the
spectacle seen is not that of the master mind of a great
disciplinarian. The Church, Old or New, does not present
the picture of a great school or institution where an
exact dietary is served at exact hours day by day ; or
where the orderly lessons of a fixed curriculum are taught
progressively in strict sequence — where, in fact, rule and
law are enforced with rigid benevolence.
It is rather the spectacle of a tender, wise physician
with many patients. He, knowing what is best, has his
rules, and makes them known. But he knows also that
he is not dealing with the sound and healthy, but with
the sick. Therefore he is not disturbed or thwarted by
finding that some of his patients are peevish, some fretty
and wilful, some nervy and dejected, some timid, some
defiant, but none quite normal. He adapts and accommo
dates himself: here coaxing, there ordering ; winning
one with a smile, bringing another round by a frown ;
reasoning with one; pleading with another; scolding a
third ; so pliant in method because so inflexible in pur
pose. He will not lose one if he can help it.
Reverently, is not that, dimly enough, blurred, ill-
expressed, somewhat how God so wise and so loving,
deals with us sin-sick men ? Is not that what Church
history and present-day experience show us of His
methods ? And therefore may not a theory of His deal
ings in the great age-long matters that have been before
us — may not a theory of His dealings which exhibits
much accommodation, much tender pliancy of method, with
inflexible benevolence of purpose — be, not right indeed,
but more nearly right, more in the right direction, than
a theory which is all law and rule ? That view of God's
way with man which has no rule or law, no distinct and
M

178 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
definite Revelation, would seem as unhelpful and un
thinkable as the opposite. There must be rule and law
in the methods of One who knows all things and is the
"Author, not of confusion, but of peace." But when
we think of what man is, the idea of nothing but rule
and law appears impossible. We know it by our human
experience, and can be very sure. To say, "This is
my rule ; if you keep it you will get a blessing ; if you
don't you will get nothing," is possible if you are con
cerned with the sound and healthy in mind and body.
But you cannot deal like that with the sinful and the
weak ; not, that is to say, if you are Love and Wisdom,
as well as Knowledge and Power.

CHAPTER XIV
PRACTICAL STEPS
We have now seen some of the chief differences which
separate Nonconformity from the Church. Quite apart
from traditions of ill-will engendered in the unhappy past
which we are beginning, albeit only beginning, to out
grow, there are great religious doctrines and practices in
regard to which at present we do not see eye to eye.
This is more especially the case in regard to Baptism and
the view or doctrine about the Church held by Inde
pendents. In regard to ordination, there is the very
important matter of the Episcopate, though there is no
other difference in our ministerial principles. The Holy
Communion stands in a rather different position. At
the Reformation the Church of England fell back on
simple Scripture. She refused all theories and explana
tions as to the relation between the outward signs and
the things signified, between the Bread and Wine and the
Body and Blood of Christ. Such explanations abounded.
On the Continent every leader was ready with a view.
But the English Church would have none of them.
There were in particular two, as remote from one another
as the poles, but, like the poles, resembling one another
very closely in character — Transubstantiation and Zwing-
lianism. Definitely and explicitly she rejects the former ;
definitely and implicitly she rejects the latter. But she
has no guess to make, nor theory of her own, and as long
179

180 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
as a worshipper is not an adherent of either of the ex
treme and rejected theories, he will find himself able to
use her service loyally. The wise will learn from the
Prayer Book to have no views, believing that the penitent
reception of the Sacrament in faith and love with thanks
giving, and not views about it, is what gives grace. But
if this account of the Church's position be correct, it
cannot be said that anyone differs from the Church about
the Holy Communion except theorists of the two most
extreme schools. Apparently there are a number of
Protestant Nonconformists who are Zwinglian, but there
are a number who certainly are not. The late Dr. Dale
of Birmingham and the late Rev. Hugh Price Hughes,
both typical Nonconformists of different denominations,
certainly were not. Nothing can be seen in the views of
either which would indicate a doctrine that could not find
a legitimate place in the wise breadth of our Prayer Book.
Among the Wesleyans this holds good also of apparently
a large number. It could not therefore be said at all
accurately that there was a great difference between
Nonconformity and the Church about the Holy Com
munion. What Mr. Hugh Price Hughes thought on this sub
ject is expressed as follows in his Life, written by his
daughter : — " The underlying meaning of the mystery of
the Sacraments also haunted him, making him a devout
Sacramentarian, who held that the essence of Christian
life lies in constant mystical feeding upon Christ in the
heart by faith." This, of course, is the belief of every
Christian, but Mr. Hughes, like devout Anglicans, with
out confining the idea of feeding upon Christ to the
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, found in that Sacrament
the pledge and principal occasion of his receiving the
Bread of Life.
The differences, then, as regards the Holy Communion

PRACTICAL STEPS 181
are rather between the Church and one school of thought
among Nonconformists, which, to judge by their books
and hymns — the latter especially — is not so very large.
But these divergences of belief about the Church, the
ministry, Baptism, and to some extent Holy Communion,
amount to an aggregate of difference which taken together
with the inherited tradition of aloofness, and the almost
complete absence of mutual sympathy, cordiality, and know
ledge, makes the chance of reunion at present nil. We are,
indeed, not very close together, but we may be deeply
thankful and equally confident, that we now are nearer,
considerably nearer, than we have ever been before. On
the whole, the very considerable movement of the last thirty
or forty years has been largely in the right direction.
What can be done, then, seeing that, as the Free
Church Year Book most truly says, "The time has not
yet come for official union " ? We earnestly desire to take
some steps, and feel sure that some must be possible.
Two courses are open, as was laid down in an earlier
chapter of this book. First, we may attack directly the
actual differences, the theological points upon which we
differ. But can we do so with any hope of success ?
When two parties have argued and re-argued, and then
argued all over again, a question or set of questions, and
each side falls back, exhausted perhaps, but satisfied,
into the position it has always held, there seems nothing
practical to be gained in restarting the argument, unless
some new facts or evidence call for attention. In this case
it cannot be disputed that there are new facts, but their
place and bearing are not yet sufficiently ascertained to
make it useful now at once to reopen the arguing. One
thing, however, we may do in this connection. We
may inquire why discussion fails to produce agreement.
There is something strange about that; and certainly
there must be a cause or causes for it, the which, if

182 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
we could find, we might remove, and so make argu
ment as fruitful of agreement as it ought to be between
honest, intelligent men who desire to agree.
It cannot be maintained that our failure to reach unity
by argument is caused chiefly or at all by the nature of
the subjects of the argument. True, they are not
matters which admit of absolute demonstration, as do
questions which belong to the abstract sciences. If they
did, there could be no more argument about them than
about the correct answer to a problem in arithmetic.
Neither are they capable of proof by actual experiment,
like many laws and facts of physical science. But it is
not the nature of the subjects which prevents agreement
— at least no Christian could believe that. On the
contrary, the revelation of God is given to unite men
in a fellowship, not to break them up into antagonistic
sections. The Sacraments are social, not anti-social,
gifts. The true nature of the Church, as planned for it
by God, is that it should be a brotherhood. The
Christian ministry is given and designed to be a bond of
union, to make, what else would be scattered, one ; to
render it possible for millions to be a single organism —
a body. No, assuredly it is not the nature of the subjects
that makes agreement impossible. If we differ about the
Church and the Sacraments and the ministry, it is in spite
of the essential nature of those things, not because of it.
But if the fault be not in the matters discussed, then it must
be in the disputants. And so it is. Where then do the
disputants fail ? They may fail in either or both of two
ways : either by an insufficient mental equipment for the
task, or morally by coming to it with such aloofness,
such lack of sympathy, such mutual suspicion, or even want
of full confidence in each other's good faith, that agree
ment is really hopeless from the start.
Iu this special case of the differences between the

PRACTICAL STEPS 183
Church and Nonconformity both these disqualifications tell.
We are all, with exceptions so few as to be negligible,
either wanting in knowledge or sympathy, and the vast
majority are deficient in both. There is not a sufficient
weight of earnest desire for unity to create a momentum
strong enough to overcome the dead weight of three
centuries of separation. This is not more true of one
side than of the other; it is equally true of both the
Church and Nonconformity. And until these things
cease to be true, anything like direct general theological
argument on points of difference is doomed to be com
paratively fruitless.
We want, then, to set ourselves to work to alter what
may be called both our mental and moral equipment for
the removal of our differences. When this is done, the
solvent will have been created, which at present does
not exist, and the barriers which keep us apart, the
barriers of different views of great Church doctrines
and practices, will not long resist. Then we shall find
that the very things which now separate us are the most
unifying of all, the Church, the Sacraments, and the
ministry. But though the pronoun " we " is not illegiti
mately used, it will not be we personally who will see
these things, nor even the next generation. It will be
a long task, but what of that ? " Show Thy servants
Thy work, and their children Thy glory." That is a
grand prayer to be able to pray in faith and hope.
The work, then, which is practical at present, is to
take two directions. First, we are to aim at a better
mental equipment, and, secondly, at a truly sympathetic
spirit and a mutual confidence in one another's good
faith and good will. When these aims have been attained,
then we can approach the direct removal of our theological
differences with hope of success, but not before. We
are thus pointed to action in two directions.

184 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
In the first place, we must study. Nothing is more
amazing than the extent and depth of mutual ignorance
which prevails in England on the part of Churchmen and
Nonconformists. The attitude of Churchmen towards Nonconformity
has been, especially perhaps during the last half-century,
one of consistently and persistently ignoring it. A
small section in the Church has fraternised with it,
proclaiming in a way that implies far more kindness
of heart than knowledge or thought that there is really
no difference. Another small section has gone to the
opposite extreme. It has held that the Church of
England is a branch of the Catholic Church, while Non
conformity is nothing of the sort. They who compose
this section therefore speak of Nonconformity and its
activities with unmixed pain, and even sometimes
annoyance. They can see nothing in it except its
antagonism to all that they value as Catholic and
intolerance in regard to the Church, and they meet it
in a similar spirit. But this is a small section also. The
great majority of Church people have achieved the rather
considerable feat of ignoring Nonconformity. Running
down the views of other people is not at all congenial
to them. It is out of date, it seems illiberal, it is unkind,
not very edifying or Christian to be denouncing the
convictions of worthy and sincere but misguided men ;
so they dismiss the whole subject of Nonconformity, and
neither know nor talk about it. When it forces itself
upon them by supporting or promoting a Disendowment
or Forfeiture of Schools Bill, they speak against it ; but
they are careful even then to do so as a political force,
and say nothing against it as a form of Christianity.
In that capacity they make no effort to do anything, but
remain in complete ignorance of it, and of everyone and
everything belonging to it.

PRACTICAL STEPS 185
The result is on the Church side an almost entire
absence of all knowledge of Nonconformity, except in
its militant political aspect. Of its origin and history,
its principles and doctrines, its methods and organisations,
its developments and movements, the vast majority of
Churchmen have little more knowledge than they possess
of the Protestant Church in France or Spain.
And on the other side (again it is necessary to add,
so far as an outsider can judge), an ignorance of the
Church equally great obtains. It cannot be said that
the Church is ignored by Nonconformity. On the contrary,
its misdoings, its dreadful past, its wrong and unscriptural
teaching, its errors and mistakes, occupy a very consider
able space in pulpit, newspaper, and literature. You can
hardly pick up a Nonconformist book or paper without
finding something of this kind in it. Indeed in this the
contrast is as sharp as it can be. But all this notice is
for the most part extraordinarily ill-informed. It is based
on a series of conventions which, like the conventional
" Mounseer " of the English farce, or the conventional
English " Meess " of the Parisian comic papers, though
founded on fact, can hardly be said to convey the truth.
This applies to writers of distinction and accomplishment,
and not merely to hack writers in minor newspapers.
Take, for instance, this passage from a volume of sermons
called Evangelical Heterodoxy, by Rev. J. Morgan Gibbon.
They are admirable sermons, good to read and to think
over, very suggestive and fresh. Congregationalism may
well value highly such a preacher. Yet here is what he
says : " Take, for instance, when the Reform Bill passed
in this country. A great fear possessed the sister
Church of England, for the State seemed as though it
would withdraw its material support. The crisis called
Newman to the front. He came with this question :
Should the Government and the country so far forget

186 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY-
their God as to cast off the Church, on what must the
ministers of Christ depend ? And his answer was this,
' On our apostolical descent.' Not on character, or
experience, or ability, or usefulness ; ' the real ground
of our authority is our apostolical descent.' That is
to say, he counselled reliance upon the external, upon
the past, on antiquity, on authority. In a word, he
Romanised.1 He asked the ministers of the State
Church to put their reliance on that which was the
living experience of no living soul."
In this passage Mr. Gibbon is quite in earnest and
is doing his best. Earnestness and real effort always
deserve respect; but it is rather difficult not to laugh;
a smile one cannot repress. It is so wrong — wrong to the
point of being funny. Perhaps Mr. Gibbon may urge
that he can quote chapter and verse for every statement ;
but even if it were true that he can, that does not make
it right. It would only be like one of Rickman's
churches. That Quaker architect, the first scientific
student of Gothic architecture, to whose researches and
diligence we all owe much, built Gothic churches. He
could no doubt point in the buildings of the past to
examples which proved him correct in every detail of
moulding and string-course, pillar, arch, and capital of
the churches he designed. But his churches are all
wrong. Though every detail is drawn from some Gothic
church, they are not Gothic buildings at all. Neither
has Mr. Gibbon even begun to understand or enter into
the ideas of those whom he condemns as Romanisers — that
is, secularisers. The first principles of a Churchman's
way of thinking are unknown to him.
We have heard Mr. Brierley before — let us hear him
again. He has much to say about Anglicans, their way
1 On the previous page Mr. Gibbon asserts " that Komanism is
secularism," and he is continuing that line of thought.

PRACTICAL STEPS 187
and their doctrines. Well, here is a picture, drawn with
all the confidence of one who has his model in front of
him and cannot go wrong. He describes a modern
ecclesiastic asking in bewilderment why the masses
remain outside his system ; and then bursts out — ¦
" What in Heaven's name do you propose to convert these
people to ? Is it to modern Anglicanism ? That insti
tution has undoubtedly some Christian doctrine inside it.
But what of its environment ? What social instincts of
the working man does its system appeal to ? Its religious
services are conducted by a white-robed gentleman, who
reads or intones a ritual which might as well be addressed
to the moon as to our artisan. This goes on in a cold
building, whose occupants are well-dressed people who
would be insulted if he sat by their side. Genial atmos
phere this for the expansion of his social instincts !
When in addition our proletaire learns that the institu
tion which, as a convert, he is invited to join is the
trenched and moated city of the aristocratic, feudal
principle; that in its government its people have no
votes ; that its interests are above all things the interests
of property, of class distinction, of social exclusiveness —
of all, in short, that militates most fiercely against his
individual and class aspirations, can we be serious in
proposing that he should join it? His conversion to all
this would indeed be the most astounding of all miracles !
But do not, in the name of common sense, let us speak of
this attitude as a rejection of Christianity. It is a
rejection of feudalism and the cold shoulder."
This is a "grotesque." It reminds us of the early
monkish illuminator's effort to evolve the picture of a
camel from his inner consciousness, with no more infor
mation than that it was an animal with four legs and a
hump. Mr. Brierley, whom I only know from his books, is
a high-minded man, incapable of spiteful and malicious

188 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
writing. But an ignorance which believes itself well-
informed may do as much harm as spite can do. I
quote the passage, however, to prove up to the hilt the
contention that, if Churchmen are ignorant of Noncon
formity, the Church is quite as unknown a land to
Nonconformists. " Travellers' tales," and dim visions
from afar seen through a haze of conventional ideas are
abundant, but they appear to be the only sort of
knowledge which exists ; and it is not likely to be very
effective in promoting reunion. The need, then, of more
mutual knowledge can hardly be exaggerated, and the
last Lambeth Conference was entirely on the right lines
in dealing with this matter. It urges upon Churchmen
these two resolutions : —
" Every opportunity should be welcomed of co-opera
tion between members of different communions, in all
matters pertaining to the social and moral welfare of the
people." " The members of the Anglican communion should
take pains to study the doctrines and position of those
who are separated from it, and to promote a cordial
mutual understanding ; and, as a means towards this
end, the Conference suggests that private meetings of
ministers and laymen of different Christian bodies for
common study, discussion, and prayer should be frequently
held in convenient centres." :
The twofold plan of campaign here suggested is
precisely what is required. It follows closely the two lines
of advance to which we have been led. We must have
more knowledge, more true, accurate knowledge, of each
other's belief and practices. And, equally necessary, we
must get to know one another in study, work, and prayer
until we know one another thoroughly, and sympathy
1 Resolutions 76, 77, of the Lambeth Conference, 1908.

PRACTICAL STEPS 189
and mutual confidence, deeply and widely felt, prepare us
for the last steps in the long task of reunion.
Let us then look at this twofold programme in some
detail, noticing as we pass how admirably these Lambeth
resolutions cover the ground, both by what they say and
by their silence. To those in the Church whose line has
hitherto been to ignore, the resolutions say, Cultivate
friendship. To those whose policy is to say that there is no
difference, and that we may surrender what impedes
reunion, the resolutions by implication say that there are
differences which need attention ; and at the same time, by
their silence about any surrender, they negative that policy.
To those few again, who regard Nonconformity as a thing
outside the pale, with which it is impossible to parley, the
resolutions recommend alliance and common study and
prayer, with an underlying respect for Nonconformity
and a recognition of its worth and importance more
weighty than many polite phrases of regard.
Now let us take the first resolution : " Every oppor
tunity should be welcomed of co-operation in regard to
social and moral movements."
What a very large field that covers ! It suggests the
picture of Churchmen and Free Churchmen working
together habitually in many enterprises. Social service
of this kind has not been studied and developed, so some
tell us, among Church people as much as it ought to have
been. On Boards of Guardians, County Councils, Vigil
ance and Housing Committees, in Charity Organisation
work, Country Holiday Fund, and so forth, there are a
very large number of Church people engaged. But they
are not there as Church people, they are there rather as
citizens. They meet their colleagues on the common
ground of patriotism and good citizenship, and questions
of " Church or Chapel " have no place. This kind of
working together on the part of men of all denomina-

190 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
tions is invaluable ; but it might become less so if the
various members were overconscious that they represented
different religious bodies. But there are other depart
ments of social service, ways of promoting the moral
welfare of the people, in which the co-operation of Church
people and Nonconformists as such is most important and
ought to present no difficulties.
First, there is the entire question of relief and the dis
tribution of alms. In days gone by there is no doubt
that one of the chief grounds upon which relief was
given or withheld was the form of religious belief held by
the applicant. It was not considered right that people
who went to chapel should receive relief from the Church,
or conversely ; and inquiry into a person's religious belief
was a kind of preliminary to examining into his case.
But speaking for the Church (I cannot speak for Non
conformity on this point), I believe that that system, if
not quite dead, only survives in a few very out-of-date
parishes. With a fairly wide experience of the relief
systems obtaining in London parishes andelsewhere,it may,
I think, be fairly said that the temporal needs of people are
met according to their temporal wants by the Church, as
far as its resources allow, without reference to the denomi
national convictions of the recipient. Any other system
is bound to be bad morally and spiritually. Economically,
of course, no tongue has ever been lifted in its favour.
But it is not enough that the Church or any other body
should have clean hands in this regard. If " Church "
and " Chapel " are both in the habit of administering re
lief in the same place or neighbourhood, they are morally
bound to co-operate, at least to the extent of keeping
one another fully and promptly informed of all cases
helped. Not to do that is to incur, with eyes either
open or voluntarily shut, and with full knowledge of what
will happen, more than the risk, the certainty, of en-

PRACTICAL STEPS 191
couraging hypocrisy, making mendicity a lucrative call
ing, and lowering the estimation in which religion is held
in those classes where relief is sought. In a previous
chapter this has been referred to, but nothing could be
more necessary, and no step more effective towards re
union, and at the same time towards the moral welfare of
the people, than this. It would remove a great stumbling-
block which bars the forward march of a great number
both of individuals, who find in the present system a sore
and irresistible temptation, and of causes, which are
hindered by the lowered moral tone and the injured
prestige of religion itself.
It is still necessary to try and bring out the harm
this want of co-operation does to the recipients, and the
thoroughness with which it defeats the very purpose
for which alms are given. The alms of the faithful are
very sacred things. They spring from some of the
highest and purest motives that men can have, and the
love and prayer which so often accompany them may do
much to counteract the lack of principle which too often
attends their distribution. The same will be true of the
kindness and goodwill to which much impulsive and
reckless giving is due. But just because these alms
spring from sources so pure and good the spirit of
wisdom and understanding and counsel should direct the
distribution of them. The love of the Christian who gives
deserves and demands the wisdom and thoughtfulness of
those whoact as his almoners. But thefailure toco-operate,
and the consequent overlapping, prevent anything of the
kind. The result is not only waste, in the sense that
much is spent and no good done, but positive harm
to the characters of whole families is wrought at the
same time.
A concrete instance, which occurred in London, and
the truth of which was investigated and established by a

192 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
committee of which the writer was a member will
establish this better than many general statements.
Mrs. B  's two children were having free dinners at a
London school, and the teachers were much concerned by
their poverty and respectability. The secretary of a chari
table institution called and found the following facts : — A
man, wife, and four children under seven. The former was
delicate, and, being often unable to work, had saved no
thing, and was in no club. The home was tidy, the inmates
were clean, well-behaved, respectable people. The mother
was quite frank ; they had bad times, she said, but help
was generally forthcoming. The sources of help were
many, and she was receiving as follows : —
(1) Parish relief (outdoor), 5s.
(2) Medical Mission — medicine tickets.
(3) Curate — a Is. ticket weekly.
(4) Baptist Mission — occasional shillings and "tickets."
(5) Wesleyan Mission — „ „ „
(6) Primitive Methodist Mission — „ „
(7) School dinners to children five days a week.
(8) "District lady " (from a distance)— "ticket"
fortnightly.
(9) Ragged School Union — boots for the children.
Inquiry showed that these various agencies were ignorant
of each other's gifts, each of which by itself was entirely
inadequate. Not one of them made the slightest effort to
deal with the real cause of the poverty — the father's bad
health. So the family dragged on, and two years later was
visited by the same official. By this time the " system "
of charity had done its work. The man's health was no
better; the home and the children were no longer clean;
the mother had degenerated past the stage where effort to
keep self-respect is made, and had become one of the many
victims of our refusal to co-operate, one more of the touts

PRACTICAL STEPS 193
who go from religious body to religious body, getting out
of them " the meat that perisheth " at the cost of character
and the finer qualities of the soul. This is what our
division too often reduces the alms of the faithful to
producing, and we can only discharge our duty and
relieve ourselves of our responsibilities by combining.
It is not suggested that many cases so gross and
tragically complete can be found. But the fact that such
a case should he possible at all indicates how sturdy and
well-grown this evil system is, and how long it has been
going from bad to worse. But relief is medicine, and very
strong medicine too, given to the malady of poverty, and
strong drugs ought to be administered with great care.
Few responsibilities are greater, even in the work of a
religious organisation, than the distribution of relief, for
it affects the springs of character, and we cannot fulfil
this responsibility unless we co-operate frankly, and the
more completely the better. This, of course, applies
eiiiefly or solely to towns, but it is of very grave importance.
If the Representative Church Council could approach the
Free Church Council, so that a joint committee of both
could consider this question, and each return to its con
stituents with recommendations for common action, not
only would a most notable reform be initiated, but a long
step towards reunion would have been taken. Without
surrender of principles or convictions, we could learn to
work and think together for the highest welfare of the
poor, whom Our Lord seems specially to entrust to the
keeping of His people. Our aloofness and our rivalries
have inflicted deep injuries upon those in need of relief
and upon the whole community.
Closely allied with this matter of relief is another
question upon which co-operation is at once truly needed
and absolutely easy, in so far as it involves no surrender
of any principle. It is in the matter of our Sunday
N

194 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
Schools. For the sake of the children, and the influence
of the schools on their characters and development, we
ought to work together. To begin with, there is the
matter of treats and prizes, which bulk very large in the
eyes of the children, and, strangely enough, of their parents
also. How far consciously, how far unconsciously, it would
be impossible to say, but we, Churchmen and Nonconform
ists alike, have given, and still give the impression in many
localities that we vie with one another as to whose treats
and prizes shall be most attractive, frequent, and valuable.
The result has been more than rather demoralising to the
children. A joint committee of Churchmen and Non
conformists to regulate these things, to fix on the best
and wisest form of reward, and a common scale of prizes,
to do away with all idea and suspicion of rivalry and of
bidding for adherents by bribes of this kind, would be a
measure of real advance in public morals. Who that has
had experience of these things does not know the shifts
and untruths and deceptions of which children will be
guilty in their efforts to go to the summer outings of
both the Church and Nonconformists' Sunday Schools, or
the winter teas and entertainments of both ? To have
these, as is usually possible without difficulty, on the same
days, or with some similar safeguard, would be an admir
able stroke for the children. But there is more than that.
We ought to prevent, what we all know to exist, though
we have hitherto perhaps yielded to it wrongly, the great
indignity which is inflicted on religion in the eyes of
children by their being allowed to wander from school to
school. The motive for this wandering is very often that
some misbehaviour has been properly dealt with by
teacher or superintendent, and in revenge the child goes
to another school. We ought not to receive such a
recruit, who should be returned whence he came, or at least
inquiry made about him. The idea is more prevalent than

PRACTICAL STEPS 195
one cares to think, that discipline is hampered by the
fear that if it is exercised, " So-and-so " will go off to
" the Church School " or " the Chapel School," as the case
may be. And beyond and above all these, we ought to
prevent, in the interests alike of the people and of
religion, parents sending their children to the Sunday
Schools of different denominations. In a very few cases,
so few as to be negligible, this may be the result of
conviction, where one parent is " Church " and the other
" Chapel," and they compromise about their offspring.
But in the vast majority of cases, it is done simply to
have " suckers " out for alms and gifts in as many direc
tions as possible. A joint committee for the regulation
and vigilant care of all these and other matters con
nected with children and Sunday Schools would at
once advance the moral welfare of the people and
reunion very materially. And should anyone feel that
these are small matters of detail with which to load
up a book of this kind, the response is that nobody
who understands the problem can doubt that it is work
among children which is really vital, and especially
Sunday-school work. Every denomination is deploring its
enormous leakage, and the comparative inefficiency of its
Sunday Schools to produce adult adherents. We might at
once add largely to the quantity as well as quality of our
respective outputs if we would co-operate along the lines
here indicated. It cannot be questioned that such work
ing together would lead on to other things. But even
if it did not, it would at least draw us together and
roll away a great stumbling-block from the feet of His
little ones.
But it is not only in the matter of relief or children's
work that co-operation is possible. The spurt in the
activities of the rationalist press only slightly intensifies
a constant need — that of a sound apologetic. It is

196 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
necessary to say " sound," because much popular apologetic
that runs into many editions is anything but satisfactory.
The quality of this work would undoubtedly be raised
if it were a joint effort of all Christian bodies. As it
is, in the writing of apologetics, all have co-operated.
Take any shelf which contains a selection of the best books
on this subject, and the works of Roman, Protestant,
and Anglican authors will be found in it. Such union
in thought suggests union in action. There might well
be a standing council drawn from all religious bodies
to forward this work, which needs some new life and
fresh direction, to keep us up to date in many lines
of thought, to sustain enthusiasm, to enlist the services
of the best men, as writers and lecturers, to arrange for
the circulation of cheap editions of sound books, and
to deliver us from the class of apologetic that hurts
its own cause.
But there is much more to be done at once than
these things. There are great issues which have dropped
into the slough of party politics, and which the Christian
conscience ought to take and lift up above party. It
ought not to be possible to side-track measures of the
highest moral importance in order to send on ahead at
express speed some question of far less moment. That
can be and is done now, because there is nothing to
set against the party system. But united action on
the part of the Christian bodies in England for the
moral welfare of the people would be the strongest
force in the country. No party could ignore it. And
we should not have needed reforms indefinitely postponed.
England is groaning and travailing together, " waiting
for the manifestation of the sons of God," while they —
well, they had a quarrel some years ago, and they
are still sulky with each other. So at present they
are doing nothing very divine, nothing to suggest their

PRACTICAL STEPS 197
true parentage. Each is supporting the political party
which took its part in the quarrel, and meanwhile not
the legislation God wants and the country cries out
for, but what the parties choose, gets their support.
During the last few years the Church and Nonconformity
has each arrived at having an organ. There are the
Representative Church Council and the Free Church
Council. Could they not make a beginning by a joint
committee to consider some of the great moral questions
that call for attention ? The care of the feeble-minded,
some legislation on the lines of the two reports of the
Poor Law Commission, and Housing are but instances
of the kind of thing out of which not enough political
capital can be made to render it likely that either party
will take them up. But the sons of God must want
to see them wisely dealt with, and can ensure their
being so whenever they choose to move as one.
But there is another matter which one is almost
ashamed to mention, yet it cannot be left out. We
must cease to throw stones at one another, not only
without provocation, but especially when there is provoca
tion. We should do well to bind ourselves in a new
solemn league and covenant that neither in book nor
pulpit nor newspaper will we run down, adversely criticise,
or denounce the doctrines or practices of any other
Christian body. If only we could get that undertaking
fulfilled for three years, what a sweetening and purifying
of national life there would be, and what vast strides
towards reunion would be made ! Let us each preach,
teach, and give reasons for our own doctrines and practices
in the most complete and systematic fashion. That,
indeed, is exactly what the age most needs — plain, positive
teaching. Let us give up all girds, digs, side-cuts, direct
attacks, and denunciation at, on, and of other religious
denominations. Our people will be much more edified

198 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
in the faith we are trying to teach, much stronger
in their convictions, far less self-complacent, and more
charitable. It gives a comfortable but most deadly sense
of our superiority, to be constantly told how spiritually
blind, or secular, or unscriptural all others are except
those who belong to our union or communion. At
the same time it must narrow the heart and sympathies,
as all self-complacency does. But it has no other effect.
Certainly it does not act as an effectual warning or
deterrent. And if some foolish priest or wild Welsh
preacher breaks this truce of God by some diatribe or
outburst of intolerance, let us not follow a pernicious
example, but go on with our positive preaching in
charity unmoved. We cannot begin to act together
for the welfare of the public till we do this, and we
can do it without the sacrifice of any of our principles.
So much then for the first of the two Lambeth resolu
tions. We turn to the second. It calls upon us to
study, to promote a friendly and cordial feeling, and to
have private meetings. First to study. We have much
to learn from Nonconformity. Amid all the many and
grave losses and disadvantages which our separation has
entailed there is one gain — not a very great one perhaps,
but such as it is we should take full advantage of it.
Their writers have grown up and been trained in a
milieu absolutely different from that of the Anglican
Church ; they inherit different traditions ; they, it might
almost be said, have a different idiom, near enough to
our own to be at once intelligible, but distinct enough to
be fresh and suggestive. They have the defects of their
qualities, as we all have, but the clergy of the English
Church would do well to read a Nonconformist book
every month, and would be the richer in thought and ex
pression for so doing. This perhaps is wiser for most
people than the study of Nonconformist " doctrines and

PRACTICAL STEPS 199
positions." To read critically and for controversy, if
merely for silent controversy in the reader's own mind, is
only fruitful in those who have had a theological training
and possess that which is very rare, the right tempera
ment for religious controversy. But to have on hand
a Nonconformist biography, or book on missions, or a
volume of ordinary sermons, so that gradually, in a
non-controversial way, we come to know what they think,
and to be in touch with their mind and heart, is an
excellent way in which to draw nearer. After that,
when sympathy and touch are assured, we might begin
more controversial reading ; but the mistake generally
made is to start with the latter. It is the common
experience of life that a difference of opinion which leads
to a quarrel between strangers or mere acquaintances
is readily settled by friends. They may not agree in
opinion, but they will agree in amity. So with our ap
proach to Nonconformist theology. We want to make
friends with it first, to see it in its gracious moods,
to catch its tone and spirit when it is contending for
nothing except to bring men to Christ. Then we shall
be able to approach its controversies in a friendly spirit,
and though after full discussion we may not arrive at
unity of doctrine yet, we may reach an amity of spirit.
They also on their side should study the writings of
Anglicans, and with the same method. In one way they
will find theirs a far easier task than ours. For
whereas it is not easy to find a very living character
istic Nonconformist book of sermons or essays or treatises,
in which controversial allusions to the Church are not
more or less frequent, it is comparatively rare in the
work of an Anglican to find anything at all about Non
conformity. Indeed I have often thought how precarious
the argument from silence is, as illustrated by our modern
Anglican theologians. Twenty centuries hence, supposing

200 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
only the works of the great writers of the English
Church in the last half of the nineteenth century sur
vived — men like Westcott, Lightfoot, Liddon, Pusey,
Robertson, Kingsley — how untrue a picture of English
Christianity would be drawn from their works ! Sharp
internal controversy would be seen, a great conflict with
the opposition of criticism and science, a great deal of
attention paid to Rome and Roman things. But of the
existence of millions of Nonconformists, active, organised,
rich, powerful, hardly a trace. That they were a great and
important factor in the national religion, no one would
infer. But to return from that digression, a Noncon
formist can choose from a very wide range of Anglican
theology, wholly uncontroversial as far as his views are
concerned, the books which will bring him into mental
touch with us.
But this method of producing intellectual and mental
sympathy is only open to a small percentage, and is in
any case a small matter in comparison with personal in
tercourse. It is by that far more than by study that the
best understanding can be achieved. It is not without
difficulties of its own. So complete has been the past
severance that when we meet, at first the most salient
feature is unlikeness. We speak, as has been said, in
different idioms. We have no common traditions. Our
schools, our colleges, our text-books, our recreations,
generally also our politics, are all different. Authors
familiar to the one are unheard of, or at least unread, by
the other ; familiar quotations pass unrecognised ; and
statements which one regards as almost axioms are new
and paradoxical to the other. If we pray together the
contrast is no less. The one is trained on the brief, suc
cinct collect of forty to sixty words ; the other on the
extempore prayer that lasts for five or six minutes. It
is as well to face this and to know it in advance. But it

PRACTICAL STEPS 201
is only superficial, and where the true motive exists, after
a certain restraint and self-consciousness have disappeared,
we find that " deep down the strata join." Churchmen
and Nonconformists beginning to meet now must recog
nise that they are pioneers, and that every year and every
generation of intercourse will make the difference smaller
and the tradition of intercourse and friendliness stronger
and more natural.
Then another source of help in drawing together re
veals itself. We have much to learn from one another.
It is certain that Nonconformity has a great deal to
teach us Church people. It is far better organised, to
begin with, exactly as anyone knowing its history would
expect. Its management of finance and business is admirably
developed, whereas in the Church we are only just
beginning to think of having finances. That its solution
of the problem of Church maintenance is the right and
permanent one is hard to believe. Pew-rents are so
wrong in principle that they can only be a temporary
expedient, and that Nonconformity is feeling the draw
backs of the system is plain.1 A free and open church
is the only thing that is defensible. But it is certainly
true that Nonconformity has taught its people the place
of alms-giving in the Christian life, and made them feel
that each individual member is responsible for the
well-being of the body. This result has been arrived at
not so much by the absence of endowments, for Noncon
formity is by no means unendowed — on the contrary, it
has and rightly values many fine endowments — but
chiefly by giving the people a genuine place in the
government of their affairs. This the Church is fast
1 " Throw yourchurch galleries open, and have no paid sittings there.
On Sunday nights I should like to see all the seats thrown open."
Advice of Rev. F. B. Meyer to the Lynn Free Church Council.

202 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
learning to do, nor is there any conflict between such a
practice and any Church principle. But we might well
study and learn much from those who have done this for
generations. Again, as regards foreign mission work, the con
tributions of money and the number of volunteers for
personal service among Nonconformists, as well as efficiency
in the organisation of this work, both abroad and at
the home base, are alike remarkable. We are far behind
in this noble race, and it behoves us to go to school
and learn. This efficiency no doubt springs largely
from the interest and enthusiasm aroused by self-
government. When people feel that they are responsible
for the execution of a plan because it is in some sense
their plan and their individual duty, they set about
supporting it in a vigorous way. Whereas when someone
else asks us, more or less as a favour, to help them in
a plan they have evolved, we feel by no means the
same responsibility or keenness. Moreover, Noncon
formists work their foreign mission enterprises on the
soundest principle. They work denominationally. The
good name and honour of the whole body is involved,
not that of some private society.
But there is yet another very important matter which
we can study with their experience, and so learn much
from them. The two systems of conducting public
worship, one by fixed liturgical services, the other by
extempore prayer, have been set up as antithetical.
In truth there is reason to believe that they are com
plementary. No church is fully equipped to do its true
duty in regard to public worship unless it is accustomed
to use both. One of our great needs at present in
the Church of England is a practice of simple non-
liturgical services, not to take the place of our Prayer
Book services, but to be based on them, to work in

PRACTICAL STEPS 203
with them, and to supplement them. Many will re
member what a powerful instrument in the hands of
Dolling were the prayer-meetings in church which
he used to conduct at Landport. Pie drew people to
the Church in the most legitimate possible way, taught
them by direct simple petitions what public prayer
was, and by weaving much Prayer Book language into
concrete petitions, got even the least educated to see
what was the drift of our most beautiful but very
abstract collects. A purely extempore system is open
to grave objections, and very poor and rough con
gregations, after once experiencing the liturgical method,
have been known to rebel when the extempore was
substituted. It is obvious that the extempore can
become as cold and lifeless as the liturgical. " We
don't need six hymns every time, two long prayers
six minutes each, the King and Parliament prayed for
at every service. . . . But O life ! life ! life ! In many
of our churches things are as dead and cold as in an
ice-house " — is Mr. Meyer's description of some Non
conformist services he has come across and his advice
to the Free Churches. Mr. Hugh Price Hughes, again,
had a strong preference for a liturgical service, at least
once on Sunday, and on Sunday mornings used one
at Craven Chapel for years. In reality there is a place
and call for both, and though perhaps in the days
when Acts of Uniformity were passed the non-liturgical
service was wisely forbidden, we may thank the Free
Churches for keeping the idea alive, and learn from
them not only its value, but what to avoid.
But these are only secondary, though weighty, matters.
We have things which go deeper and reach farther
to learn also. If they have kept alive the practice of
extempore services, they have emphasised far more
important points. From some of these they themselves

204 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
alas ! seem drifting. Is it fancy — not quite, it must
be feared — that they do not preach " the naked gospel,"
the simple appeal of " Jesus Christ and Him Crucified,"
the place of conversion, and the call to definite self-con
secration as once they did. The fervour of this evangelic-
ism, so potent and so needed to-day, seems to have passed
to Anglicans of the school of Father Staunton of St.
Alban's, Holborn. But those traditions are theirs still,
and if no longer characteristic of their fashionable
preachers, are yet strong in the rank and file.
It is not quite certain, again, that an emphatic
protest (even though, like most emphatic protests, it
be a little over-vehement) against the magical use and
view of sacraments will ever be quite unnecessary. The
very fact that we believe intensely in our own un-
worthiness to come and feast with Jesus makes, or
tends to make, what we are and what we do in the
sacrament seem so unimportant. Of course we do
not believe, as our Nonconformist brethren strangely
imagine we do, that the words and actions of the
earthly and visible celebrant work like magic or weave
a spell. They are rather pledges of the spiritual power
and presence which graciously meet us. But our
nothingness and His all-sufficiency so grasped may
issue in a wrong habit of soul and mind. It may
come to mean to us that He does everything, and
it does not much matter what we do. The necessity
of the co-operation of a true and lively faith, so that
we may receive both the res and the virtus sacramenti,
may fade from our thoughts and cease to be our effort.
And if this should happen, we are all but ensnared,
and our hold on spiritual truth is in great danger.
So there is something to be learnt from the fear of
Nonconformity about the Sacrament of the altar. That
fear is panic, exaggerated, unbalanced. It has led to

PRACTICAL STEPS 205
flight from the truth, as well as from the error that has
been connected with it. But there is that in it from
which we can learn. The outward, the external, is
nothing in itself, and may even be a barrier for the soul
unless we draw near and use it with a faith so purified
by penitence and so upraised by thanksgiving that we can
see spiritual things with almost open eyes.
But perhaps it is from the Baptists that we may learn
one of the most direct and weighty lessons of all. The
practice of Infant Baptism need not be defended here,
nor indeed is any defence of it necessary. But it carries
with it obligations in two directions that we have not
followed out with due and thoughtful earnestness. A
Church which baptizes infants is bound in a very solemn
manner to teach children the whole faith with thorough
ness. It cannot honestly be said that we have done this,
or are even now doing it adequately even in our day
schools, far less in our Sunday schools. Secondly, the
Church which baptizes infants is very solemnly bound to
do all it can to ensure that her children are not only duly
instructed, but that that instruction goes home. One by
one these lambs of Christ's flock should be given every
help and opportunity to make their self-surrender to
God. Rightly used, there is no time or opportunity for
this equal to Confirmation, when every sort of spiritual
influence can or should be helping the child to a right
and, by God's grace, permanent decision. But for many
and many a day Confirmation was not so used. There
was, with exceptions all along, an awful gap between the
system of the Prayer Book and the practice of the
Church. And even now, though our use of Confirmation
has improved out of all knowledge from what it was, it
is to be doubted whether this aspect of it is sufficiently
recognised and fulfilled. What in the jargon of to-day
is called the subjective side of Confirmation, the turning

206 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
of the candidate in heart and soul to God, Whose love
has become manifest, is not emphasised enough. The
teaching of the objective gift, and plain, clear instruction
in the faith, are the best approaches to this, and are
meant to result in it ; but too often the result is taken
for granted, and the great opportunity is lost.
Now if one examines attentively the objection of
Baptists to Infant Baptism, it relates in fact to these
very points. They protest, and rightly, against a baptism
which does not include knowledge and conversion ; J and
their existence should be a constant reminder to us of
how deeply we are committed to make the instruction of
children, and the converting result of that instruction, a
primary duty which we must strain every nerve and be
ready to make any needed sacrifice to discharge.
Need it be said that no great body of Christian people
persists and increases because of the erroneous element in
its teaching ? The reverse is true. It is the element of
truth which it contains that gives it vitality. The true
way to reunion is for us to study the teaching of the Free
Churches till we find out what is their kernel of truth.
We shall always find that we possess it already, but
that it has been, if not quite forgotten, obscured and
under-valued, and even now it is probably not fully seen
and valued. To put it back into its proper place is to be
ready for reunion with the body which stands for it, as
soon as goodwill and the right temper enable it to be
seen that the reason which once seemed at least to exist
for separation exists no longer.
That gives us our general rule all round. The common
enemy of us all is undenominationalism. Above all things,
if we desire reunion we must, one and all, Church and
Free Churches alike, avoid paring down or letting drop
1 I am not using this word in any strict sense, but to save paraphrase.
I trust that its context will indicate sufficiently its connotations here.

PRACTICAL STEPS 207
the positive truth or truths for which we each stand. Let
us cease the negative destructive work of criticising the
faults and mistakes of others. Let us concentrate all our
prayer and energy in positive effort, to fulfil the whole of
what we hold. We can do this with ever-increasing mutual
goodwill and co-operation in works of mercy and patriotism.
To act in charity up to what we know of the truth is the
way in which to be set free from error. And though we
may in some things seem even to be working in opposite
directions, it will prove that we have wrought in unison
all the time. The workers in the Simplon Tunnel started
from opposite sides and travelled in opposite directions, yet
they met at last to find that each party had made the other's
work useful to mankind, and that between them they had
produced a new and better road through the difficult moun
tains. So shall it be with us. Only assuredly we must not
leave our own workings to go off and join the others : still
less to begin to drive an intermediate gallery of our own
devising. That will retard, not hasten the completion of
the task. Rather we must with all steadfast diligence push
straight on in the true direction ahead of us. Our chief and
constant fear must be lest we deviate from the line laid down
for us, because we think that it will be easier to work in
another stratum. We must hold on unswervingly. We
may sympathise with and encourage one another by
messages of kindness and times of recreation spent together.
But we must go on with even rigid exactness, each cleaving
steadfastly to his own line. And in the end, perhaps sooner,
perhaps less soon than we had imagined, but in the end we
shall see that each has actually been completing the other's
work all along. And we shall stand face to face, clasping
hands at last in that place of blessed peace and union, which
though no human eye has ever seen it, God has known from
the beginning and revealed in advance to our faith and
hope and love.

CHAPTER XV
OUR RELATION TO THE ROMAN COMMUNION
It may seem hardly courteous to have reserved till the
end all mention of what Manning called the principal
Nonconformists. They ought on every ground of pre
cedence and priority to have come first. But the reason
for reserving them to the end as a kind of Appendix is
that there is very little to be said and still less to be
done. There is no movement or change in the chief
factors of the position to record, and nothing that
makes reunion more likely. On the contrary, humanly
speaking, it can, alas! hardly be questioned that we are
farther, not nearer, than we were. There is no sign that
the long frost is giving, it seems as hard and settled as
ever. What makes this the sadder is that a set of
circumstances occurred in the nineteenth century that
might have made our relations easier and hopes of
reunion greater.
The Evangelical Revival was followed by, and in part
certainly produced, another revival in the Church of
England, a revival namely, which drew out and empha
sised afresh what we may call the Catholic as dis
tinguished from (not as opposed to) the Protestant
element. It marked the fact, which in many quarters
had been forgotten, that the Church of England was
something more than a Protestant body. It took the
view that its essential position and the real raison d'etre
of the Church was, after all, not Protestantism. It was

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 209
and is indeed protestant — that is, against certain
assertions, doctrines, and practices in the Church of
Rome it feels bound to make earnest and steadfast
protest. But this fact, forced upon it from without, is
no more than a very sad and regrettable accident of its
position ; it is not at all the essence of it. If we are
a Protestant body and no more, then when the Church
of Rome reforms, as it surely will, in regard to those
matters against which we protest, we should have to
vanish, as no longer having any raison d'etre. But
the reform of the Church of Rome will not be the
knell of the Church of England ; on the contrary, it will
call it to fresh activities and make them more fruitful.
No, the true work of the Church of England is to
minister to the nation the gospel of God as it has been
received and handed down from the beginning.
After all, a great body cannot live on negatives ; and
to protest is merely negative work. But there was time
in our Church's history when this protesting seemed to
be the most urgent and important thing for her to do —
so important that it overshadowed everything else. I
think the generality of people do not understand yet how
tremendously necessary this protesting or Protestantism
was towards the end of the seventeenth century, more
especially at the close of Charles IPs reign and in the
short time that James II was our King. It was as
necessary to the nation politically as it was religiously.
For just then Romanism meant strangely enough, not
the Pope, who tried to restrain James and was in alliance
with William of Orange, but it meant Louis XIV and
as great a threat to English independence as any that
our history records.1 William III meant our independ
ence as well as our Protestantism, and the triumph of the
1 In many ways the position of English independence was more
critical in 1688 than in 1588.

210 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
latter was the safety of the former. So when in the
eighteenth century English religion, like the religion of
all Europe, went to sleep, wearied by more than a century
of religious passion and strife, it went off in a thoroughly
Protestant mood. But when the Evangelical Revival
roused it, it was inevitable that very soon thoughtful men
who could grasp principles should see that there was
much more important work to do than protesting ; and
as soon as that stage was reached, the discovery was
quickly made that we possessed all the means for doing
that work. We had the ancient Book of God's Church
in a translation of singular beauty ; the creeds of God's
Church, its sacraments, and its ministry ; we had in our
Prayer Book a spiritual manual of devotion and a Vade
Mecum for daily life based on the ancient models and
containing a large number of the ancient prayers. We
had also the ancient churches, and that most spiritual
and evangelical of institutions, the ancient "Church's
Year." Scarcely any of these things had been properly
understood or used. The wealth of opportunity afforded
by the Christian Year had been missed, the churches
were closed, save for two or three hours on Sunday,
and neglected ; the standard of administration in regard
to the sacraments had been terribly lowered, and the
Bible, though read and valued, was studied apart from
its living context and best commentary. Too many of
the clergy were country gentlemen and magistrates ; too
many of our bishops were learned and scholarly peers of
the realm. After the " 30's " all these things began to
be reinstated in their proper positions, and their true
spiritual meaning revived, with great devotion and learn
ing, and also with the mistakes natural to pioneers and
enthusiasts, as well as those due to the exaggeration and
warping of judgment caused by bitter opposition.
Now it was inevitable that the men most influenced

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 211
by this revival should turn their eyes to continental
Christianity, and wonder whether reunion with the
greatest branch of the Western Church was impossible.
They knew that they too belonged to the Catholic
Church. They felt the greatness of what they shared
in common with their brethren on the Continent — the
same creeds, the same ministry, the same sacraments, the
same round of feast and fast, the same prayers, the same
collects, epistles, and gospels. The debt of the English
Church to the Roman See must always be large ; not only
to Gregory the Great for the mission of St. Augustine
to the Angles, but for centuries of help and friendship
and support. It would be unchristian and ungenerous
to allow the memory of this to be wiped out by insisting
on any later treatment of a different kind. Moreover,
the Roman Church which cast off' the English Church
was, these Anglicans felt, not the same as the Rome of
their day ; for the Council of Trent was a reforming
council to a far greater extent than Protestant historians
have yet realised. So naturally enough the idea of
reunion with Rome grew and the desire for it increased
proportionately. When men desire something very strongly, they look
about to see what steps, if any, can be taken towards
realising their wish; and it happened just at this time
that something occurred on the Continent which seemed
as if it might possibly prove a providential opening.
There were among the French clergy, as there always
have been, some men of great learning, candour, and
probity of thought, and in particular some very erudite
canonists. Their attention had been drawn, 'largely by
admiration for Cardinal Newman, to study the move
ments of the English Church, its ideas, position, and
theology. And of these some had come to think, with
those reserves which a Roman priest is bound to make,

212 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
that the condemnation of English Orders, generally
assumed to be entirely invalid by Roman writers, had
been hasty. True, the congregation of the Holy Office
in 1704, in the case of Mr. Gordon,1 had made an adverse
decision, but it was not in such a form as to make a loyal
priest regard the matter as finally closed. The old
Nag's Head fable was frankly abandoned by these
writers, and also the very unhistorical history of Billuart,
who up to that time had supplied the data of fact
employed by Roman controversialists.
This movement of French scholarship was not un
noticed in England ; and to those who were praying and
longing for union it seemed as if it might be the
beginning of better days. For if the Roman authorities
could be induced to study the question of English Orders
afresh, and came to the same conclusion as these French
canonists, then a very great stride would have been
made. The whole question would enter a new and much
more friendly and favourable stage. A great deal would
still remain to be done — how much these keen promoters
of reunion did not perhaps realise. But a gain of the
greatest magnitude would have accrued, one which
in time, if even after a very long time, must bear
fruit. One point alone will show this. If Anglican
Orders were recognised, and the English Church came
1 Mr. John Clement Gordon was an English priest who went over
to the Roman Communion, and being apparently unmarried, wanted
to continue his ministry. The case was referred to the Holy Office,
which on April 17th, 1704, reported that he must be ordained before
he could be recognised as a priest. In view of present-day Roman
use, it is interesting to note that no mention is made of the utterly
unjustifiable practice — so very needlessly insulting, of rebaptizing
him. The Pope (Clement XI) having read the report of the Congre
gation, " decrevit quod prsedictus Johannes Clemens Gordon, Orator,
ex integro ad omnes Ordines, etiam Sacros et Presbyteratos pro-
moveatur, et quatenus non fuerat Sacramento confirmationis ruunitus,
confirmetur : " but not that he should be rebaptized. The fable of
what happened " in Tabernam ad Caput Equi in platea Cheapside
Londini," figures large in this document.

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 213
to be regarded in Rome as a sister or daughter Church,
then in spite of all irregularities its ideas and the truths for
which it stands would have an influence far greater than
they can ever have so long as we are held to be nothing
more than an heretical sect. And in time whatever of
truth those ideas may contain would tell and be accepted.
So long as they regard us as they now do, they will
neither know nor wish to know what our position is.
But another circumstance gave hope. At this time
the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, was a man of the greatest
personal holiness, and of a singularly loving and gentle
heart. There can be little doubt that his attitude
towards heretics was one of the tenderest and most
fatherly solicitude. He had no sort of contempt,
anger, or indignation for them. In particular he
yearned, with true affection and no small admiration for
them, to be the means of blessing the English people.
All this had been long known, but it came out, just
at this very time (April 1895) in a most striking and
public way, in a beautiful letter which the Pope
addressed to us as a nation. His action was the more
marked because he addressed us direct, and not through
the Roman hierarchy in England.
It cannot, I think, be wondered at if ardent souls
thought that the Hand of God was visibly drawing us
together, and that something like an actual step could
be taken. This view was held by members of both
communions. A joint review, the Revue Anglo-Romaine,
published in Paris, written in French, edited by Abbe
Portal, himself among the most learned of canonists,
began its short but brilliant and intensely-interesting
career. In the columns of its thirty-four numbers
Anglican and Roman met on common ground as equals,
and put forth the points of their cases with the frank
ness and cordiality of deep mutual respect. The De

214 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
Hierarchid Anglicana of Messrs. Denny and Lacy stated
the English case with courtesy and force and with a
Latinity which in itself commended their cause.
Matters went with great swing, and hopes were high,
increased, of course, when it was definitely known that
Leo XIII had appointed a commission to inquire into the
validity or otherwise of English Orders.
It would be an error, though it is one constantly made,
to think that those who acted in this manner and were
sensible of these hopes, belonged only to the extreme
section of the English Church, and were few in number.
No one took a deeper or more sanguine interest in the
matter than Mr. Gladstone himself, certainly no
extremist ; and when the moment came he intervened
publicly by a step which attracted the attention of all
Europe. He caused a letter to be published, which
though formally addressed to no one, was in reality
addressed to the Pope. The public memory is short ;
it was in May 1896 that the letter appeared, and it is
already forgotten ; but at the time practically every
daily paper in England, and every paper of note in France
and Italy, commented upon it at some length. The letter
itself was put into the Pope's hands, and will in due time
become a document of great interest to Church historians.
The (then) Archbishop of York, Dr. Maclagan, was
another prominent and by no means extreme Churchman
who showed public interest ; and his Church Congress
sermon that year on Reunion was translated into French
and read with keen interest on the Continent.
But before the commission had finished its deliberations
and made its report, the result was practically announced
to the world, though indirectly. The Pope spoke again,
this time in the Encyclical Satis Cognitum, or, to give
it its official title, De Unitate Ecclesiw, It was, as
Cardinal Vaughan said, an authorised declaration of the

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 215
only terms on which reunion with the " Catholic Church,"
whether of an individual or a corporate body, was
possible. And The Times, commenting, pointed out
truly that the Pope did not leave the least shadow of
excuse for the illusions of those who persisted in mis
understanding his former actions.1 The conditions upon
which alone reunion is declared to be possible are clear
and simple. "These conditions are the full and entire
acceptance, not only of the primacy, but also of the
superiority and absolute domination of the Roman
Pontiff over all those who claim to belong to the
Christian Church ; and in consequence the entire sub
mission in heart and mind, intelligence and conscience,
of Christendom to the decrees of the papal chair."
There were no new arguments, no new feature, except
perhaps that the papal claims were set forth with a
gentleness and amiability which have not always marked
similar utterances on the subject. But that only made
the complete and absolute shutting of the door seem
more final and irrevocable. It was not slammed with an
angry swing, but it was calmly and deliberately chained,
bolted, and then nailed. Gentleness is so much more
final and impressive than anger when it closes a door.
After that it was hardly necessary to wait for the
Report of the Committee. Anglican Orders were
declared invalid for reasons some of which would
certainly not have borne cross-examination, but behind
them all was this, that any body of Christians not in
communion with — that is, submission to — the Pope of
Rome is ipso facto in a state of schism, and their orders
and their sacraments and all that they have or do are
tainted at the source and bad. We know now, at all
1 There were two of these — (1) the letter Ad Anglos, already
alluded to, p. 213, and (2) in April 1895 a solemn call which the Pope
made to all Christians throughout the world to join together in
prayer for the unity of all Christian people.

216 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
events, exactly where we are, and that, alas ! is farther off
than ever.
But this little piece of history, this rise and fall of
a movement after reunion with Rome, does not, un
fortunately, disclose all the developments in the same
direction which have occurred in recent years. The last
half of the nineteenth century saw two more formidable
barriers erected between England and Rome through
the hardening into official dogmas of the two doctrines
of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility.
It is true that prior to their respective promulgations
both had been held in some form or other by almost
every Roman Catholic. But there is a great difference
between even a very widely-diffused opinion and a
doctrine which must be believed under pain of excommuni
cation. Moreover, the second doctrine, that of the Pope's
infallibility, having never been defined, was capable of
much softening and fining down, and might, as it stood
prior to the meeting of the Vatican Council, have proved
a very small obstacle to reunion, if other things did not
stop the way. It might have been interpreted to mean
no more than that when speaking ex cathedra as the mouth
piece of the whole Church, declaring its decision in council,
the decree of a Pope should be accepted as final. But
now it stands up stark and unmistakable, a newly-added
and most formidable barrier in the way of reunion.
It ought perhaps, however, to be said that Newman,
who strongly deprecated the doctrine being brought
forward, speaking of it to Bishop Ullathorne as a great
calamity forced upon the Church by " an insolent and
aggressive faction," did not apparently interpret it, after
the Council had defined it, in any very serious way.
In an open letter to the Duke of Norfolk he limits the
attribute itself, and the number of occasions on which
it could come into play, within very narrow bounds.

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 217
He also gives instances of a series of cases in which he
would feel justified in resisting an order from a Pope.
He evidently felt the delicacy of that position, for he
said, " I should look and see what theologians would
do for me ; what the bishop and the clergy round me ;
what my confessor; what friends whom I revered; and
if, after all, I could not take their view in the matter,
then I must rule myself by my own judgment and my own
conscience." If this indeed be a tenable view of the mean
ing of the dogma, then its importance has been exaggerated
even more by its supporters than by its opponents. But
there is reason to fear that such an attitude towards the
central doctrine of the Roman faith, the key of the arch,
would meet with little consideration now ; though it may
perhaps reappear, and be welcome enough as a golden
bridge in some far future day.
Nor again is this all. For in the last few years, and
specially during the pontificate of Pius X, each step
taken by the Church of Rome officially has been to put
it more out of touch with the movements and spirit of
living thought and progress. Its attitude towards
critical questions is declared not by the condemnation of
the Abbe Loisy, which might have happened in any
communion given to condemning opinions, but in its
authoritative decree that it is contrary to sound faith to
believe in "two Isaiahs," or to doubt that the entire
book bearing the name of that prophet is by one and the
same author. Its attitude towards social and political
questions is shown by its condemnation of Muri and the
Christian socialism of many eager, enthusiastic, and in
doctrine, orthodox, Italian priests. Its attitude towards
history has been recently revealed by the condemnation
of the sound and moderate work of the Abbe Duchesne.
So that officially the Roman Church recedes further and
further from all harmony and sympathy with present

218 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
thinkers and workers in the intellectual and political
world. Its treatment of the great Dol linger, especially
when contrasted with its inaction in regard to his equally
great pupil, Lord Acton, as also of that distinguished
scientist, the late Mr. St. George Mivart, disclose a line
which has been all too faithfully followed.
But if official action is all one way, and that way
deplorable from our point of view, the fact that this
repression is so constantly needed against so many, in
such different countries, and such different fields of
activity, proves that beneath the unbroken, unchanged
official surface there is stirring a life which, if it could
break forth and develop, would possess and show a
hundred affinities with us. There is one great fear
however, which it is hard to lay aside — the fear lest, as it
becomes better and better understood that the free and
fearless pursuit of science, or history, or criticism is
incompatible with membership of the Church of Rome,
the " intellectuals " will more and more drop off from her
communion. This will have a doubly evil effect. She
has already suffered a great deal from the loss of
practically all the Teutonic nations of Europe. She has
become, as her invariably Italian Pope seems to suggest,
the Church of the Latin races. That, in the admission
of some of her best sons, is a great loss. If she is now
to lose touch and sympathy with the intellectuals
of the Latin races also, her prestige, influence, and
power to reform are greatly reduced; and that is a
loss to the whole world. In European Europe, if I may
dare the expression, millions of people seem unable to
think of religion apart from Rome. If they do not
belong to her communion they belong to none, and
either have no religion or are hostile to it. This is
specially true of the Latin races. Look at the barrenness
of French Protestantism and the history of the Old

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 219
Catholics in France. And if the Latin races are lost to
Christianity, it is a blow to human progress all over the
globe. No Christian, then, can wish to see Rome weaker
or discredited. When the great burden of work that is
still hers is considered; how for millions she, and she
alone, represents Christianity; how, in spite of all the
grave defects which we believe to be in her, she still
teaches men and women the secret of true holiness, and
brings them into personal living contact with the grace
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the
fellowship of the Holy Ghost — the thought of her losing
her hold on the Latin races is as of a calamity to the
Christian cause ; because at present, and, as far as we
can see, for generations to come, any work she ceases to
do on the Continent will not be taken up by any other
form of Christianity, whether purer or not — it will simply
cease to be done, and Europe will cease to be Christian.
We can do nothing for her. Her present official
attitude renders all hope of reunion impossible for the
present, and not one direct practicable step towards it
can be taken. Her attitude towards us, when not scold
ing and contemptuous, like that of some of her quite new
converts, is that of a very kind, deeply-grieved father or
mother to a very wilful, naughty child. No thought of
equality, no idea that she may be wrong, or that anything
in her could need alteration crosses her mind. She is
absorbed in contemplating our extreme naughtiness. At
times she reminds one almost to laughing point of the
maiden aunt who is offended by a nephew, and cannot
believe that he whom she knew as an infant is now a
grown man. She does not condescend to argue, hardly
to listen to what we urge. One can almost hear her
saying, " No, dear ; when you have owned that you have
been naughty, and have said you're sorry, then perhaps I
may listen ; but not till then." And no doubt we seemed

220 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
very young and were very small in Elizabeth's reign, and
appeared very naughty and wilful, with our score of
bishops and few doubtful clergy, and a laity whose views
were unknown even to themselves. But that was three
hundred and fifty years ago. Now no reunion can come
through the attitude of father and ill-behaved child.
And so long as it lasts all direct approach is barred.
And some of the indirect ways also, for much the same
reason. Roman priests very rarely come and take part
in any public life or affairs. Manning felt that very
strongly. "All the great works of charity in England
have had their origin outside the [Roman] Church. For
instance, the abolition of the slave trade . . . not a
Catholic took part in it. France, Portugal, and Belgium
trafficked secretly or openly in slaves. To this day there
are slave-owners in those countries. And the temperance
movement ? It was a Quaker who determined Father
Mathew to enter into this movement. Catholic Ireland
and the Catholics of England have done very little for
temperance. " The same for the law protecting animals. . . . The
same for the law protecting children. . . . The same for
the preservation of morals. In this last I was the only
Catholic priest. I could prolong this list. . . . Work in
favour of shop employees, of omnibus and railway men,
of women and children sweated by employers and driven
on to the streets by being under-paid ; not one of these
has been founded by us. We stick in our sacristies. Not
only do we Catholics keep out of these things on purpose,
but some of us don't take the trouble to know what is
going on, and others are withheld by their prejudices."
That is still very largely true. I do not think
it is altogether the fault of Roman Catholics, at all
events as far as elected offices go. But we do not meet
them in public and general committees and get to

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 221
know them by transacting affairs along with them. The
attitude of parent and naughty child prevents it, we must
imagine. They would not even work with the Church over
the Schools question where principles and interests were
identical. So that there is no avenue of approach by the road
of better personal knowledge and mutual understanding.
There are, it would seem, three things that we ought to
do. There is, first of all, prayer that the door now so fast
closed may be opened. It is not an easy prayer to pray. It is
hard to pray for something when one does not hope to
see any answer. To pray " Give peace in our time, O
Lord," is not difficult ; but " Give peace in someone else's
time, generations ahead," is not so easy ; it lacks, or
appears to, actuality. Yet it is a prayer that should
often be on our lips ; and the more " Protestant" we are,
and the more keenly we feel that the Roman Communion
is in error, the more earnestly we should pray for it.
Because, as has been said, it is and humanly speaking will
be, the one agent for the maintenance of Christian faith
and life in some of the greatest nations of the world.
Then though we can do nothing to approach, we should
jealously guard against any act on our part which may
widen the breach. At times the unceasing aggressiveness
of the Roman Church in England, the overweening
arrogance of its claims in regard to marriages, and its
unceasing proselytism, make controversy and a direct
countering of its claims necessary. There are chances, then,
of making the breach wider which we should take pains
to avoid.
But, more than that, we should be very careful not to
let slip any point of our Catholic heritage, or to obscure
at all our claim, and the strength of our claim, to be the
Catholic and Apostolic Church in this land. The Prayer
Book has never yet had quite a fair chance and trial
given to it. It affords us even as it stands all the oppor-

222 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
tunity we need for a spiritual and devout, a sober, restrained
and therefore effective expression of what the Athanasian
Creed calls " the Catholic religion," which is our profes
sion. It is possible, or even certain, that both parties in
the Church have greatly exaggerated the importance of
vestments and many other symbols of that kind. It is
possible, therefore, that our wisest course now will be to
permit a very wide diversity of uses, out of which there
will grow in due time that use, or set of customs, which
is, so to speak, organic and racial. These will be the
really appropriate clothing of what we believe and under
stand, and therefore of what we want to express, when
we worship God together ; and they will grow up with
little or no friction.
We are not the same nation as we were in (say) 1500.
We do not, feel or think as we did then ; so that the
minute revival of the old ritual of England, however
accurately done, will not suit us, any more than a re
version to the clothes of those days would. It is not,
therefore, for a revival or retention of a full Catholic
ritual that I plead. It is rather that we should exhibit
more and more the spiritual, evangelical power and life
with which every part of our Catholic heritage is instinct.
But we must remember that these Catholic inheritances
of ours are not the only ones we receive. In our legacy
from the past, in Church matters as in others, there are
elements undesirable as well as desirable. And we must
take care that the former do not obscure and hinder the
latter. For instance, we receive from the past the legacy
of the Catholic ministry, its Episcopate and priesthood
especially. But we do not receive these Orders without
admixture. With them we receive customs, ideas,
legalities, traditions which are far from being Catholic
(Feudal, Tudor, Caroline, Hanoverian), which hinder and
prevent the full expression and development of the Catholic

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION
ministry. We inherit the Episcopate, but with sees too
large, palaces which are often burdens, powers which
are too restricted, traditions which are not all useful or
sound. We inherit the priesthood, but with ideas of
training and preparation which need revision, with
traditions of mere parochialism, with too little dis
cipline, too much entrenchment in a legal freehold ; in
some cases with too little and in others far too much
burden laid on them. These are mere specimens, but
they may suffice to show that our Catholic heritage is
obscured, that its spiritual power is hindered, because
we receive it from the past with other inheritances of
a different and even of an opposed character. It is
a winnowing of the wheat from the chaff as regards our
Catholic heritage that we need far more than a ritual
revival, and it will be our best contribution toward future
reunion with other Catholic bodies. I gladly admit that
the two are not mutually incompatible; indeed for many
minds they are in true accord. But it is now evident
that for most English people a rapid or doctrinaire
revival of ritual imports prejudice into a matter which
we want kept from prejudice, and distracts attention
from matters on which we want all attention concentrated.
Our revivals of a Sarum, and our adaptations of a
Roman ritual, do not help towards reunion. They do not
conciliate — of course they are not intended to — the
goodwill or win the respect of those belonging to other
communions,1 while they have tended, as a matter of
fact, to divide us. On the other hand, an intensely de
veloped revival of the spiritual vitality and force of our
Catholic heritage, and a concentrated effort to get rid of
what hinders its expression, would tend to unite us in a
strong and vigorous life. And when we, not in a party-
1 They make some Roman priests bitterly angry and contemptuous,
as letters in The Tablet some years ago showed.

224 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
section, but as a body, have come to know the spiritual
power of our great inheritance, the right ritual will grow
up naturally. We shall, as it were, clothe the love which
the Sanctifying Spirit has given us for these holy gifts in
such outward expressions as come without dispute to
manifest our belief. A ritual such as that would in
deed be worth having, and a very sacred and spiritual
possession. Is it quite a dream to think that we are ripe
for a united Catholic movement on such lines? Not
one which will divide us into Protestant and Ritualist,
leaving us weak and not very august, but one that would
unite us in a strong spiritual Catholic religion. If that
could come there would be an Anglican Communion so
full of true power, so manifestly catholic and apostolic, that
no communion in Christendom could listen unmoved and
unaffected by her protests or her overtures about re
union. It could not be treated de haut en bas, like a
naughty child, and it could then perform its great double
task of stretching out a hand to separated Protestants and
to separated Catholics, between whom, in the providence
of God, stands the English Church, at once Protestant and
Catholic, and in sympathy with both.
And there is a third step towards reunion with Rome
which would seem also to depend on and wait for such
a Catholic revival as is hinted at above. We can draw
nearer to the great Churches of the East.
The Christian world, it is well sometimes to remember,
is not divided into Protestants and Roman Catholics,
with a small Anglican body somewhere between. There
exists also that great mass of Eastern Christianity which
is as determined to resist the Roman claims as we are, or
any Free Churchman is. Leo XIII did not leave them
out of his appeals for reunion, and at nearly the same
time as he addressed us he addressed the Eastern Chris
tians also. Of their antiquity, their conservative ad-

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 225
herence to everything ancient, and their abhorrence of
every kind of novelty there is no question. Our Reforma
tion did not touch them, so no trace of the new heresies
which Rome detests attaches to them. Their succession
from apostolic days and sees is disputed by none.
Nevertheless, in Roman eyes they are mere schismatics
and heretics, and must be brought into the true fold if
by any means it can be done. The reply of these Eastern
Bishops to Leo's letter is not without significance to us.
They declined his overtures with perhaps over-much scorn
on these grounds : —
The addition in the Nicene Creed of the Procession of
the Holy Ghost from the Son as well as from the Father.
That instead of a complete triple immersion of a person
being baptized, the Church of Rome allows sprinkling or
mere dipping.
The substitution of unleavened for leavened bread in
the Holy Communion.
An alteration in the form of the Consecration Prayer at
the Holy Communion.
That the faithful are communicated in one kind only,
the Cup being withheld.
All the Roman innovations of doctrine as to the de
parted, which may be summed up in (1) the peculiarly
Roman conception of the purgatorial fire ; (2) in the
theory of the Treasury of Merits ; and (3) in the im
mediate judgment of the saints.
The promulgation of the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin.
Lastly, and at most length, the claims of the Pope to
be the Head of the Church, and that all not in com
munion with him are in a state of schism.
I have put out this list just as it appears in the official
reply of the Eastern Bishops, for it shows plainly, among
other things, that the English Church is not by any

226 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
means the only body which is definitely both Protestant
and Catholic. If to refuse the Roman claims and addi
tions to the faith, while claiming to be catholic, con
stitutes the much-despised Via Media, it is well to
remember that that route is not peculiar to Anglicans,
but is thronged by the great Christian bodies of the East.
It will be seen, too, how closely they approach
the ground on which we hold back from Rome, and
how much we have in common, therefore, with these
ancient Churches. Moreover, between us and them there
is no bitter past; no memory of injuries, or feuds or
slights. If by degrees we could enter into close relations
with them, both our position and theirs in regard to
Rome would be far more influential than it now is. If
Eastern and Anglican Christianity, each following its
own special bent, not attempting to demand or impose
similarity of discipline or ritual, but sure of each
other's essential Catholicity and adherence to apostolic
doctrines, could in great matters act together, recog
nise each other's orders, when abroad attend each
other's altars, and from time to time take part in each
other's ordinations and consecrations, the reunion of
Christendom would have largely advanced. At present
our relations with Eastern Christianity are friendly and
sympathetic. In those places where the number of English
residents or visitors demand the presence of an English
priest or bishop, we are careful that there shall be no
proselytising, and their canonical rights and jurisdiction
are fully recognised. Moreover, many acts of kindness,
courtesy, and help are gladly acknowledged on either
side. But as the list of their protests shows, they are
intensely conservative, and much has yet to develop among
us before the reunion between them and us can be achieved.
We must be more united among ourselves, more evenly
and uniformly sure throughout the length and breadth of

RELATION TO ROMAN COMMUNION 227
our Church that we are indeed the Church Catholic in
this land ; more spiritually alive to the glory of our
inheritance, before communion with them can be secured.
And they too, perhaps, must come to realise that not
every detail, however ancient, is so essential that it can
be made a condition of communion, and that, while men
hold the faith together, they may be patient of wide
diversities of views and practice.

CHAPTER XVI
TERMS OF COMMUNION
The writer has made no effort to define or even to
examine closely the terms or conditions of communion
between different Christian bodies. He believes that we
are still so far from reunion itself as to make this task
both needless and very difficult. To set out a programme
in advance, generations in advance, is futile. Still, a
few words on principles may not be an unfitting close to
this book.
To begin with, certain negations seem so sure that they
may be made briefly and without risk. For instance,
it seems unquestionable that ritual and ceremonial
will be excluded. That there will always be ritual and
ceremonial cannot be gainsaid ; and that they will
always be matters of importance no one who knows
human nature and the history of these things can doubt.
Yet that even similarity in such matters can ever be
a condition of communion between Christians is un
thinkable. In those distant days when we really " con
sider one another to provoke unto love and to good
works," a Divine liturgy with enough common char
acter to be recognisable in all lands may be achieved;
but even this will scarcely be a term of communion. So,
too, with matters of discipline and organisation. Racial
characteristics, conditions, and needs differ widely so
that what is necessary or desirable in one nation would
work amiss in another. We may instance the question of
228

TERMS OF COMMUNION
a married or a celibate priesthood as one in which unani
mity is not possible or advisable. Similarly with all such
matters as finance, patronage, and recruiting for the
ministry, and many others, we may expect very consider
able diversity.
But there are not a few doctrinal issues, as to which
strong opinions are held, but concerning which the
Church Catholic has, so to speak, never closed the door.
They are, and long may they be, open questions. There
is no theory of the Atonement, no detailed Eschato-
logy, no theory of Inspiration, within very wide limits
no theory of Baptism or the Holy Communion, on which
all men must think absolutely alike, or be judged to
have departed from the Faith. In these matters no
more agreement is to be demanded than that they should
believe ex amino that " the chastisement of our peace
was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed"; that
Death and Judgment, Hell and Heaven, are very awful
realities; that the Bible is inspired and enshrines the
Word of God ; that we are bound to be baptized and
receive the Holy Communion in penitence, faith, and
love; these are one and all integral parts of the Faith.
But how the Death of Christ is our life is not a closed
question ; and while there is no need to have any view,
there is room for many views within the Faith. If men
so wish, they may make for themselves pictures of
Heaven and Hell ; but they must not force them on
others. The "How" and the "When "of Judgment,
the precise nature, effect, and immediate and ultimate
results of Death; the precise connotations and process
of the Inspiration of Holy Scripture; the nice state
ment of precisely what is and what is not effected by
Baptism, this holy Sacrament itself, how much after
growth in holiness is due to it, and how much to other
means of grace; the exact phrases to be employed in

230 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
describing the scope and mysteries of the other great
sacrament, together with the " mode " of the connection
between the outward part and the ' thing signified ' ;
• — as regards all these matters, the truths involved are so
wide and deep, so outside our natural experience, belong
ing to regions in which none of us has yet moved with
open eyes, that human thought can only grasp a portion
of the facts and human language must lag still farther
behind. In all such matters as these, and I have only
mentioned a few typical cases, where Revelation is silent,
we may have our " pious opinions," and find them
helpful and satisfactory to ourselves, but we have no
title to impose them on others.
Taking these as specimens, it would seem likely that in
the reunited Church of the future the terms of com
munion or the conditions of membership will be few
and broad and simple.
There are, however, three subjects on which it appears
necessary that we should agree — the Godhead, Jesus
Christ, and the Church. Not that these are three separate
matters. For " in Christ dwelleth all the Godhead
bodily " ; and again " He hath given Christ ... to be the
Head over the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of
Him that filleth all in all." But for purpose of thought
we may begin to think of them apart.
It would seem necessary, so I venture to say, for
Christianity that we should all believe in The One God,
the One great Fellowship of men, and also in the One
Mediator Jesus Christ, who in Himself unites both,
having Oneness with God in virtue of His Eternal God
head, and with man by reason of His very Humanity.
Outside these great cardinal points, however, we should
be very slow to impose any further or additional terms
of communion.
But Christian history presents something very different

TERMS OF COMMUNION 231
from the spectacle of a society of men bent on maintain
ing a simple faith, consisting of a few broad truths,
strongly held. As it develops it becomes more and
more the story of people anxious to have as minute and
all-embracing a code as possible. This is not the case
in the age of the great councils, whose decisions, as so
often has been pointed out, embody no definition of the
faith, but a determination to keep that faith simple
and to refuse philosophical glosses and explanations.
But after this era, the farther we go in Church history,
the more complete and elaborate becomes the process of
definition. In the earlier period theologians who are
acknowledged as among the greatest the Church has
produced, write and speak of all kinds of Christian
doctrines and practices, with supreme freedom and flexi
bility. For instance, isolated passages from their writings
can be quoted to prove them to have been advocates, in
regard to the Holy Communion, of every theory over
which the disputants of the medieval or Reformation
periods fought. This does not mean that they held any
of those theories, but that they, having no hard and
fast or defined theory about this august mystery, wrote
of it, now with this, now with that, aspect of it upper
most in their thoughts, and used now this, now that,
figure to convey their meaning, free from all self-con-
ciousness and rigidity.
But as history goes on, this freedom disappears. One
by one every point is defined, and theological accuracy
and nicety on every subject is demanded of every writer
and preacher. It may be conjectured that this change
was due largely, but not of course exclusively, to the
change in the task which fell to the Church. When the
civilisation of the Roman Empire and its culture were
practically destroyed by barbarians, the Church no
longer had to commend the faith to and win the ad-

232 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
herence of cultivated and thinking men, but of untaught,
uncultured hordes. She had to change her tone and
methods. With all these tribes and races still in their
infancy to win, teach, and train, she was almost forced to
have an answer for every question and an exact doctrine
to cover every point. Have we yet realised the reaction
of these backward races on the Church ? You cannot be
constantly saying to young children, I don't know, I
don't know; especially if your only hold upon them is
the awe with which you can inspire them. You are so
apt by this road to lose their respect. When they grow
older you can explain to them that our knowledge must
needs be very limited on all subjects, and that the
teacher we can follow with most confidence is he who
fears not to say, I don't know. But in dealing with the
child-races who had mastered Europe, whose sole teacher
and nurse she was, a different tone was necessary to the
Church. They were victors in the full flush of a wonder
ful triumph over the Empire. They accepted the
Church's discipline and the curb of her Faith, because,
being children, their sense of awe and wonder was fresh,
and they were deeply impressed by her wisdom and
knowledge. They believed that the Revelation of God
was hers without reserve ; and she could never have won
or kept her influence over them, had she been constantly
declaring her inability to answer their questions. It
would have been useless to have told them that on a few
great questions the truth was clear, and that a few great
principles were inexorable ; but that outside those matters
there was room for a variety of views, and that it would
be wrong to dogmatise too nicely. For this reason I
believe in the main, though for other reasons also, there
grew up, and came to be most firmly established, a new
leading idea and a practice founded on it. The idea
was that the mind and will of God, with all His counsels

TERMS OF COMMUNION 233
for man, were plainly revealed, and in such great detail
that no question could be raised to which an authoritative
and therefore binding answer could not be given. Hence,
too, arose the habit of explaining and defining everything,
and branding as a heretic everyone who did not loyally
accept all these explanations and definitions. So was
built up the amazing structure of medieval theology. It
knew everything, not by human guess, or in " pious
opinions," but by the Revelation of God. It knew exactly
what happened to the departed. It could draw pictures
of heaven, hell, purgatory, angels, saints, devils, just as
travellers now draw pictures of Japan or the Arctic
circle for those who wish to know what these places are
like. It knew all about what occurred in the spiritual
world. The entire Divine economy as regards man was
clear and open. It knew precisely what happened in the
sacraments, and what saint or angel attended to this or
that department of work. There was nothing it could
not tell. And all this was authoritative ; it must be
accepted. It was God's truth, not man's; and he was
impiously resisting God and setting an example of re
bellion against truth who doubted or denied. Such a
system could never have grown up had the Church had to
face and deal with mature and civilised races, especially
those who possessed the culture of Hellenism. But this
system grew to its full capacity, and was one of the main
elements in the creation of the papal theories. For it
leads directly to the idea that there must be someone to
settle every question with God's authority, and that there
can be no unsolved problems. But it broke down as
soon as the child-races became adolescent, especially as
at that very time they recovered the lost and forgotten
treasures of Greek thought.
The leaders of the new movement, however, when
they revolted against the medieval system, clung fast

234 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
to the medieval theory and practice. They objected
to the application, but they did not question the
principle. They also, Calvin as much as any school
man, Luther as much as Aquinas, believed that they
knew everything. To them just as to any thinker
of the Middle Ages the Revelation of God was like
a nicely -completed plan done to scale, covering the
whole ground and forestalling every difficulty. They
were confident that a minutely-detailed system was
not only capable of being expressed, but that to put
it forth was the bounden duty of every leader and
body. So it comes about that the Reformation period
is one, not of return to the broad principles of the
ancient creeds, but of lengthy " Confessions " which
review and dispose of every question. Plow else was it
possible to set the Papacy right, and to take its place
in guiding and commanding Christians? And in like
manner it seemed self-evident that to question or reject
any item of this body of truth was the sure token of an
impious and destructive spirit which must be cast forth.
So Christendom sacrificed a possible unity of life
for an impossible unity of thought, and it has not
yet learnt this, its primary mistake. The Roman Church
dreams that she can still take the mature nations of
the West back to the days of their childhood ; and too
much non-Roman theology is imbued with the same
idea, which still persists in our midst.
The fact is that you cannot codify Christianity.
It is possible, by taking great pains, to codify the law
of a country. The Code Napoleon has been a benefi
cent success; but then human experience, thought, and
language together, suffice to reduce human law to a
code which answers in advance every question and
covers every case.1 But with spiritual things it is
1 It must, of course, be kept up to date as new conditions arise.

TERMS OF COMMUNION 235
otherwise : neither thought nor language can even begin
to be adequate ; while the truths involved are so vast,
that the experiences of those who have done most and
are most wide-minded, only show them how much more
there is still to be experienced.
Let us take an instance. If men would only think
of it, how can they hope, in regard to that institution
which " the Saviour did not bring into His Church
without the profoundest reason or without having the
highest and holiest ends in view,"1 to know all and
be able to dogmatise in detail ? It is impossible that
any words of ours can exhaustively express its nature
and enable us to say, " It is simply this," or " It is no
more than that." How can we imagine it possible to
fathom its laws and measure up and describe its pro
cesses ? Our only wisdom must be to include all that
is recorded by the devout of their experiences, to em
body all known aspects, patiently allowing utterance for
all thoughts which men find helpful, until they begin
to be forced on others as necessary to salvation. The
important, vital question about this "sovereign in
stitution" is, do men use it, value and love it, give
God hearty, humble thanks for it? If you read the
Eucharistic hymns and prayers of the devout of every
communion, it is clear that they do; and in comparison
with this attitude of heart and soul towards the Blessed
Sacrament, their views and theories about it have far
less importance than they or we are apt to think. It
is hard, therefore, to believe that identity of sacramental
doctrine will be a condition of communion when wisdom
has grown ripe in the warmth of love. Identity of
practice, of regular, devout, frequent, loving, penitent,
thankful, faithful reception, there will be. But that
all should express the same views in the same language,
1 Manual of the Congregationalist Union, v. p. 95.

236 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
if they trouble to have views at all, is unthinkable.
And in that sweet and mellow climate the sharp extremes
will disappear. It is only in a stage when an exagger
ated importance is attached to views and theories that
they could ever have arisen, and they are dependent
upon each other for their very existence. If there had
been no misunderstood doctrine1 of Transubstantiation,
there would have been no Zwinglianism, and to this
day each derives most of its vitality from its opposite.
And as here, so in many another old battlefield
where Christians have squandered their forces and slain
one another. The fight need not be fought, the differ
ent theories may live and let live, till a deeper under
standing resolves our seeming discords into harmony, or
leads men themselves to strike out the discordant notes
from the score. The ideal and practice of family life
are what Christendom should aim at reproducing. There
a few great principles are absolute and inexorable.
Parents must be loved, honoured, obeyed, and trusted.
Brothers and sisters must live together with true
affection in mutual service, with deference and courtesy.
They must act for, value highly, and promote the
honour, concord, and true prosperity of the family. But
these thing's secured, they may have very different
views, pursuits, pleasures, and interests. The music
one likes may bore another, and the scientist of the
family may often wonder what the poet of the family
can possibly mean. There may be among them tem
peraments radical and conservative, or men of thought
and men of action. What one thinks beautiful may
be ugly to another ; and one may enjoy what another
shuns. But the unity of the family is not jarred
and broken. It persists through and blends all these
diversities. 1 Misunderstood very often by defenders as well as opponents.

TERMS OF COMMUNION 237
In the family of God these ideals and practices have
been forgotten. We have been far too ready and eager
to detect and denounce heresy, and not nearly grave
and repelled enough at the thought of schism. We
have failed to perceive that it is not necessary or possible
for us to think exactly together, while it is both possible
and necessary for the honour of our Father and His
work that we should live together. But there must be
the fixed principles also, which must be consistently acted
upon and consciously held. There must be one Lord,
and His Name one. We must worship — that is, confess,
love, and revere — the same God. And by reason of
sin, if for no other reason, we must have the One
Mediator, Whom and Whose work we all accept, know,
and love. And next to that we must all believe in,
accept and desire the unity and highest welfare of that
great human fellowship which, human though it be, is
also the household and family of God.
Now of these three factors it need hardly be said
that since quite early days, it has been about the last
that most misunderstanding has existed. By some it
has been ignored, by many denied as it is to-day,
and even by those who most keenly support it much
has been done contrary to the spirit of it.
For how often the fellowship has been sacrificed to
some imagined doctrinal necessity ! A man has departed
from the generally-received view of Justification, not
doubting that he is justified, but the exact process which
procures his Justification : or, without doubting that he
receives unspeakable blessing from the Holy Communion,
has questioned the exact process by which he benefits.
Then all men have risen on him, howling him down
as a heretic, and if he did not go out of his own accord,
have done their best to put him out of the fellowship.
Not that there has been much need of that. As a

238 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
rule he has been as hearty in calling them heretics,
and as ready to go off as they have been to expel him.
Both sides have had no other idea of Christianity than
that of a complete system, tabulated under headings.
So while we have had panics about heresy, we have been
callous and reckless about schism. The reverse is the
true order. We ought to be very slow to cry, Heretic.
The word ought to be used very rarely indeed. We
should do well to confine it to theories or doctrines which
interfere with our faith in the One God or the One
Mediator, or obscure the great fellowship or make more
difficult the terms of its membership. Every time a
man is driven from or leaves the fellowship of the Divine-
human family because of his sacramental or eschato-
logical or soteriological views, a grave and disastrous
error occurs. We might learn better, if we wished, from
the Apostles in the very earliest days of all. If ever
there was a departure from the belief of all the rest
which seemed fundamental and intolerable, it was the
unbelief of St. Thomas. It may be almost said that
the Christian society had but one article of faith at
that time — belief in the Resurrection. It stood for
everything ; and though even now it is the corner-stone,
then it must have seemed the whole structure, and St.
Thomas refused to accept it. But the rest would not
let him quit the fellowship. He was wrong and obstinate.
Pie had no right to doubt them and all their independent
narratives and testimony. But they were more anxious
to keep him than he can have been to remain with
them ; and the event proved them right. That is a
fine conception of unity : a patient tolerance based on
the strongest belief of the value of the fellowship,
and that continuance in it is the best, if not the only,
chance of correcting error. The unity of believers
is the living body in which the crooked have their

TERMS OF COMMUNION 239
sole chance of growing straight. This conception is
dominant in the New Testament and, so far as we know,
for some time after.
It is not forgotten that the " heresy " of St. Thomas
lasted only a week. But if it had lasted a year or five
years, is it conceivable that the Twelve would have driven
him away as long as he agreed to stay ? There have
been many examples of such continuance in the Apostles'
fellowship, and even " in the breaking of the Bread "
on the part of those who could not for the time say
yes to all the Apostles' doctrine. Matthew Arnold was
a regular communicant, and no merely formal one. There
is an essay by John Shorthouse, "The Agnostic at
Church," which amply repays its reader.
But comparatively soon we come to the age when
those who had "views" were turned out, or went off,
leaving the fellowship, seeking vainly for something
better and purer than the Church; and thus unity
has become less and less an actual fact. But unity of
life has been lost, with no gain in unity or purity
of doctrine. On the contrary, the doctrinal confusion
increases. We must grasp the idea that, provided the truths
about the Godhead and the Person of the Mediator are
safeguarded, the great point to achieve is not that we
should all think as one on every point, but that we
should all live and work and worship together, as
members of the holy family.
And it is here that we can see the vital importance
of that principle of continuity to which I have referred
elsewhere. In England the Church clung to it, when to
have departed from it would have smoothed away all her
difficulties and secured her safety in the hour of danger.
It is this principle which the Puritans could not or would
not recognise, and every expression of which they sternly

240 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
rejected. But if this great Divine-human society or
fellowship exists (if it does not, the ideas of union and
reunion are void of meaning), then we can make no break
or failure of continuity without terrible loss. The idea
of a clean, sharp-cut breach with the past, and a going
off to found a new fellowship on a fresh basis is un
thinkable. It was on this conception of Christianity that the
Church of England acted at the Reformation. She
would not leave the fellowship as she saw it and under
stood it. She refused to break off and make a fresh
start on a new model. She believed in One God, One
Mediator, One Family, and she could not leave the
last any more than deny the former. She resumed a
liberty of action which she believed then and believes
still that she always possessed, but she would do nothing
to separate herself from the fellowship.
I am not here arguing the point that her action was
right, and that she succeeded in her intention of remain
ing in the Divine-human society. I am merely stating
what cannot be questioned, her intention and desire.
And no part of the Church has ever given greater proof
of sincerity of intention to abide in the society ; for when,
in the reign of Charles I, she could have turned defeat
and poverty into security and ease by doing those things
which involved in her eyes a break in continuity, she
refused without hesitation.
Here, then, are three main conditions of communion :
belief in the One God, the One Mediator, and the One
Family, and it is on these lines that we may dare to hope
that reunion may be found. Within that family, with
these primary conditions secured, there will be room and
welcome for wide differences of all kinds — of ritual and
ceremonial, of discipline and organisation. But beyond
and more than that, it will also be recognised that though

TERMS OF COMMUNION 241
the Revelation is final and complete, our power to grasp
and express it is still very imperfect ; and that it is so
wide and glorious that not even when all the nations of
the earth have made each its contribution of experi
ence and thought, will our understanding begin to be
perfect. There will be still new heights unsealed, with
new glimpses of fresh beauty, new depths of wisdom, new
springs of grace and power and life. Therefore there
will be much diversity of view and doctrine and theory
as each race and individual brings its contribution of
thought and knowledge into the one continuous fellow
ship. But the diversity will be the harmony, not the
discord, of God's family, for none will say, "This I
have discovered, and anything anyone else may discover
is wrong " ; or, " This is the aspect of truth which I see,
and any other is false." So the terms of communion will
be few and simple, which does not mean a bare and
meagre faith, or that we shall cease to write, preach,
and ponder over such matters as sacraments and prayer
and the Four Last Things. Nor does it mean that we shall
be obliged to confess that all questions are open, and
that there is no good in having any theology. The
reverse will be the truth. Theology will be recognised as
a true science, the record and investigation of an ever
growing knowledge and an ever-ripening experience. It
will be positive and fruitful, enriched by meditation,
maturing in peace, unhindered, and unfretted by con
troversies, stimulated by the frank and free exchange of
thought. And of those matters which remain unclosed,
no one will think that we know nothing about them. On
the contrary, we shall know more and more, and better
and better. But for that very reason, just because our
knowledge is growing fuller and richer, we shall feel
how impossible it is to reduce it to exact doctrines or
find men by definitions. We shall have more and more
a

242 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
to teach, but more also to learn. Only of one thing shall
we be sure — that even the subject of which we know most
transcends our knowledge. We have been defining too
much, imposing too many limits, trying to codify the
spiritual, and then to set up the results as terms of com
munion. And what has been the result ? It is not too soon
or unfair to ask the question ; for this method, this
principle and its practice, have had a very long trial.
The Papacy tried it for some centuries without a rival
competing with her. Next, since the sixteenth century,
those countries which rejected papal domination have
continued, as we have seen, on the same lines, while
those countries in which the counter-Reformation
triumphed have continued as before. So the system
of defining and explaining, the system of the authori
tative solution of every problem, has had a long
and varied trial. Has it succeeded ? We know the
purpose it is supposed to serve. It is supposed to
direct men ; to save them from the paralysing result
of uncertainty ; to afford the guidance of clear, plain,
cogent, systematic knowledge of God's Will, Law, and
Way. That is the purpose which is to be served — the
sole, and if fulfilled the quite sufficient, justification for
this theory.
I ventured in an earlier chapter (Chapter V) to com
pare the present position of the religious world to East
Street or the New Cut on a Saturday night. What has
brought it to such a pass ? Is it not this principle and
practice of attempting to define and explain with scien
tific accuracy, in categories and systems, our spiritual
heritage? But for this fatal idea, which the Reforma
tion adopted in toto, such a condition could never have
arisen. It has produced this confusion, rivalry, contro
versy, and noise. It has set up a dozen "Churches" or

TERMS OF COMMUNION 243
denominations making claims which they cannot sub
stantiate, and which in their failure have involved the
highest and holiest of truths and gifts. Christians have
always been ready to love, honour, and use the Holy
Communion. There has never been and never will be
any difficulty for a man to feel and know its beauty
and sacredness. Our nearness to the Living Lord in His
Feast, is the constant experience of all His people. But
what men have tried to do is to vivisect this living gift,
pulsating with His love ; to dissect it and take it to
pieces ; to show exactly all that it contains, and to
anathematise as idolaters or soul-destroying heretics
those who in a similar task point to a different result
and propound other formulae. So with the very Cross
of Christ and His atoning Death. We have claimed
to demonstrate what is not demonstrable, and to define
what we may know best by loving and using it. Nothing
has escaped. No process has been too subtle, no mys
tery too deep. Even the very love of God in creation
and His eternal purpose has been systematised and ex
plained and limited.
If it had been merely futile, it would not have
mattered. But it has been mischievous. For now that
the Christian world has listened to and endured these
rival theories for some centuries, it has grown dis
dainful and impatient, and is likely to neglect, not the
rival theories about Sacraments, but the Sacraments as
well ; not the theories of Atonement only, but the fact of
Atonement too ; not the competing ideas about means
of grace and ministries, but the means of grace and
the ministry also. The old idea and practice had a
great purpose in view, no doubt. But it has not been
fulfilled. The entire result is a break-down. The
issue is confusion, not peace ; and mankind has found,
instead of guidance, bewilderment. It is time the
o, 2

244 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
other line had a trial, and we resorted to terms of
communion broad and simple, admitting men into
the Family of God, in which the full wealth of
Christian experience, thought and feeling is freely de
veloped, not cut down to suit the exigencies of special
theories and views.
And if any should inquire as to where man can find such
a basis of communion set forth, no better answer could
be given than the "Nicene" Creed. In that ancient
Symbol we have the doctrine of the Godhead and the
Person and Work of the Mediator plainly declared. And
then on that basis we are called to believe in, and therefore
to enter the Catholic Apostolic Fellowship. There are
no theories or views of sacraments or justification. There
are no schemes and doctrines of Predestination and Elec
tion or Inspiration or Eschatology. With this Creed as
his basis a man whose metaphysical turn of mind made
such things helpful to him, might weave high thoughts
and profound speculations about many a point connected
with the Elements in the Holy Mysteries. Another of a
different type might find it helpful to his more lively
faith in the Incarnation of Our Blessed Lord, that he
should think of the Blessed Virgin as immaculate from
her earliest beginning. Another might find the difficult
task of prayer made easier by the conviction that he and
the blessed saints were in such touch, that in the provi
dence and tenderness of God they helped him to pray
and joined in prayer with him. Others, again, of a dif
ferent mould would not find help or refreshment in any
such ideas. For them it would be enough to bear in mind
what Jesus and Holy Scripture say about the Sacrament
of the altar, or about the birth of the Saviour. They would
experience sweet and restful communion in the simple
thought of His nearness and love. But this would not
break or even strain the Fellowship. Such diversities,

TERMS OF COMMUNION 245
and a thousand others on points of doctrine and ritual,
would not disturb the peace. Week by week all would
meet to join together in the Nicene Creed and receive
together the Bread of Life in sermon and sacrament.
They would recite the fact of God ; of Redeeming Love ;
of Sanctifying Grace ; express once more their belief in
the Apostolic Fellowship, and finding therein Forgiveness
of sins, would look forward with confident hope to the
Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to
come. And if there were no truth in the idea of the
Immaculate Conception, in that calm uncontroversial
atmosphere it would die out without heat and anger.
If there were no fact in the spiritual world corresponding
with the idea that the Saints aid us in prayer, it would be
discovered ; though why we should all have the same
experiences or be dealt with after the same manner,
seeing our great diversities of need, it is not easy to
understand. And so with a hundred other points,
practices, and doctrines. The Holy Spirit can guide us
into truth even though we may not denounce as a heretic
everyone who sees truth in an unusual aspect or propor
tion. Quiet talk, with no threat, spoken or suppressed, of
expulsion ; patient affection and brotherly love ; a strong
faith that no one can continue very long in the holy
Fellowship without being led to all necessary truth, even
as St. Thomas was — these are stronger, more spiritual,
and more potent means of teaching the truth and
making men to be of one mind in the House of their
Father than the conception of a Faith with scores of
propositions, which must be accepted or expulsion will
follow. How far we now are from that faithful, loving
wisdom, that divinely-patient temper ! A great selfless
ness and a deep humility must be joined with an as
surance and steadfastness about great principles and
foundation-truths which nothing can shake. Every

246 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY
step which Christendom makes towards such a state
will not only sweeten and purify its life, but will
strengthen it to fulfil all those holy purposes for the
sake of which God created the Second Adam and the
new humanity.

INDEX

ACTON, Lord, his view of the Re
formation, 73 ; his verdict as
to the St. Bartholomew, 74 ;
Rome's inaction as to, 218
Alton Locke, description of a Cal
vinistic mother in, 83
Anglicans, contrast between them
and early Puritans, 71, 74 ;
compared with Calvinism, 83 ;
attempt to combine, 85 ; atti
tude in seventeenth century
towards Catholic Church, 87 ;
reading of Nonconformist books,
198
Apologetics, a field for some joint
action, 195 et seq.
Apostolic succession, 24, 25, 173
Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 35 ; and
Holy Communion, 239
Atonement, the, 229
Baptism, form of, in dispute
in England, 52 ; regarded as
negligible by thousands, 42 ;
divorced from Holy Communion,
16 ; 1658 view of, by Congrega-
-tionalists, 96 ; Infant Baptism
strongly urged in 1864 Manual
of Congregationalists, 98 ; valid
ity of, 139, 143 ; views of, 179
Baptists, the (see also Indepen
dents), a primary tenet of, 65 ;
no creed, 65; their " Thirty-two
Articles of 1689 " (re-edited by
Spurgeonl855),95; and baptism,
101, 115, 205
Beza, his dictum about toleration,
90
Bible, the, 85, 155, 156, 157, 169
Bible Christians, 66
Bigots, 14
Billuart, 212

Bishoprics connected with
baronies, 69
Bishops, their historical position,
124 et seq.; St. Paul as a
"Bishop," 135; Free Church
" Bishops," 151, 153
Boleyn, Anne, the influence of her
Reformed views, 73
Bribery by religious bodies, 43 ;
its results, 44
Brierley, Mr. J., on sacerdotal
leanings, 115 ; the Eternal Re
ligion, 117 ; his views as to the
Christian ministry, 122, 131,
136; of Anglicanism, 187 et seq.
Buddhism, 15
Bunyan, John, his picture of the
Pope, 25
Calvin, John, 72 ; his method of
conducting Servetus' trial, 73 ;
his conception of Revelation,
234
Calvinism, Importance in Puritan
ism, 72 ; demise in English
Nonconformity, 72 ; opposition
to Anglican views, 84 ; difficulty
of combining with Churchman-
ship, 85 ; importance to Inde
pendency, 154
Cambridge Mediaeval History, the,
125
Camisades, the, 2
Carlyle, his feeling about poetry, 33
Cartwright, the Puritan divine,
his contention, 86
Casaubon, Dorothea, quoted, 32;
Isaac, his view of the Anglican
Reformers of his day, 87
Catechism, the Free Church, on
Sacraments, 107; on the Min
istry, 137 et seq.

248 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY

Catholic, connotations of the word,
27
Catholic Church, 25 ; terms of
Communion, 229, 230 ; early
efforts to keep the Faith simple,
231 ; effect of barbarian con
quest of Rome, 232 et seq.; a
new theory and practice, 232
Catholicism, attitude of Noncon
formist thinkers towards, 88 ;
Dr. Horton's verdict, 89 ; its
part in developing and safe
guarding the life of the Chris
tian body, 149 et seq.
Cecil, 24
Cholmondeley, Miss, Red Pottage, 47
Christadelphians, the, 66
Christianity, 234
— Eastern, its attitude to Roman
claims, 225 ; its characteristics,
225; andChurchof England,226
— English, present position of,
38, 39 ; changed attitude of
science towards, 47 ; principle
for " Indiff erentism " not open
hostility, 41 ; effect of disunion
on, 41
— Western, 9
Christmas Day, its observance
made penal, 86
Church, the, attitude of Inde
pendents to Episcopacy, 146;
Independents' conception of,
147, 150 ; comparison between
present age and third and
fourth centuries, 159 ; two views
of its history, 172 el seq. ; mea
sure of agreement necessary to
unity, 230 ; terms of communion,
229 ; certain essentials, 229 et
seq. ; early efforts to keep the
Faith simple, 231 ; effect of
barbarian conquest of Rome,
232 ; a new theory and practice,
232 ; ideals and practices of
family life, 236
Church of England, differences
between it and Nonconformity :
period of origin, 3 ; nature of
difference, 61 ; doctrines set
forth in Prayer Book, 64 ; con
nection with the State not
essential, 69 ; Bishoprics, 69 ;

Protestant, 70, 209; differed
from Puritanism, 71 ; relations
with Nonconformity, 80, 81, 82,
chap. ix. passim; Marian re
action and Elizabeth's caution,
87 ; ideas of toleration in early
seventeenth century, 90 ; atti
tude towards art, 91 ; ideas of
ministry, 115, 123 ; present-day
changes in doctrine, 157; two
fold separation, 183 ; different
attitudes of Churchmen, 184 ;
Lambeth Conference, 188 ; sug
gestions based on Lambeth
resolutions, 190 et seq.; points
in which we may seek instruc
tion from Nonconformity, 201
et seq. ; use of Baptism and
Confirmation, 205 ; condition
in early nineteenth century,
210 ; debt to Rome, 211 ; the
Roman claim, 221 et seq.
Clergy, their ejection, 3 ; friendly
private meeting with Noncon
formist ministers, 68
Combes, M., French Premier, 40
Competition of the Churches, 9 ;
harm caused by, 43 ; effect in
distribution of relief, 190-193
Conference, Lambeth, its recom
mendation as to Nonconformity ,
188 et seq.
Confucianism, 15
Congregationalism (see also Inde
pendents), a primary tenet, 65 ;
no creed, 65 ; Sacraments in
1658 and 1833, Manual of 1864 as
to Baptism, the Lord's Supper,
94, 95 ; views of Sacraments,
Baptism, Holy Communion,
chap. x. passim; Infant Baptism,
99, 100, 101 ; Holy Communion,
103 et seq. ; view of the Ministry,
130 ; their view of the Church,
146 el seq. ; modern conditions,
158
Congregationalists, declaration of,
in 1658, 17, 130
Continuity, the principle of, 170
et seq.
Controversy, Religious, 46, 70
Conventicles, 3
Council, Vatican, 28, 216

INDEX

249

Creeds, the, in the Prayer Book,
64 ; why Independents must be
creedless, 66 (see also " Nicene ")
Dale, Dr., his view of the Holy
Communion, 180
Dearmer, Dr., 64
Disunion, 1, 8 ; signs of discontent
with, 9 ; fatal to proclamation
of God as Father, 14 ; to effici
ency of Christians, 16 ; to the
doctrine of the Trinity, 17
et seq.; competition between
religious bodies, 43-49 ; effect
in the Foreign Mission field,
chap. vi. passim; on Anglican
Mission work, 55 ; signs of im
provement, 81
Dolling, Father, his Prayer meet
ings, 203
Dollinger, 218
Duchesne, L'Abb6, 217
Durham, Bishop of, 64
Edinbuegh Conference, 53, 81
Edward VI, 87
Eldad and Medad, 166, 168
Elizabeth, Queen, her caution a
benefit to the Church, 87 ; Non
conformity in reign of, 146
Emancipation, Catholic, 3 ; of
slavery, 220
England, Church of (see Church)
Episcopate, its place in the Chris
tian ministry stated, 124 ; its
function, 126 ; what is involved
in its rejection, 129, 138, 144 ;
the Nonconformist position, 145,
150, 161 ; Independents' view
of, 148 ; embodies a great prin
ciple, 169
Evangelical Revival, the, 208
Excommunication, 147
Family, Christians members of
one, 10 ; bearing on unity and
disunion, 11 et seq. ; disunion,
15 ; the principles of family
life, 236
Fatherhood, God's, its bearing on
the question of disunion, 12;
reality of, 13
Five Mile Act, 3

Forsyth, Professor, a leader of
Nonconformist thought, 81 ; his
book, Religion in Recent Art and
its Testimony, 92 ; his view of the
Ministry and its functions, 133,
134
France, anti-Christian movement
in, 41
Free Church Catechism (see Cate
chism)
Free Church Council, its more
friendly attitude, 81, 197 ;
statement in its Year Book, 82
B'ree Church Year Book, 82, 151,
180
Friends, Society of (see Quakers)
Gibbon, Rev. J. M., his Evangelical
Heterodoxy, 185, 186
Gladstone, Mr., his letter to the
Pope, 214
Godhead, the Doctrine of, 230
Gordon, John Clement, 21 2 and note
Gordon Riots, 3
Gregory the Great, our debt to,
.211
Halifax, Lord, 64
Hierarchid Anglicand, De, 214
Holy Communion, the, regarded
as negligible by thousands, 42 ;
baptism as an antecedent to,
42 ; Congregationalists' view of
1658, 96 et seq.; from 1658 to
1864, 103 et seq. ; H. P. Hughes'
view of, 107 ; Church of Eng
land's attitude towards, 178 (see
also under Sacraments)
Horton, Dr., a leader of Noncon
formist thought, 81 ; his con
ception of Catholicism, 88 ; and
of the Reformation and Pro
testantism, 89
Hughes, Rev. Hugh Price, his
views as to Sacraments, 107,
180 ; of liturgical services, 203
Ideals, practical force of, chap.
iv. passim; usually unacceptable
to English, 32, 33; Jesus Christ
the great Idealist, 35
Immaculate Conception, 216, 244
Incarnation, the, 68, 69 ; agree-

250 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY

ment necessary for Christian
unity, 230
Independents, the, i.e. Congrega
tionalists and Baptists, q.v. 66
Inquisition, the, 2, 24, 73
Inspiration, changed views of, 155,
158; and the Catholic Church,
229
Ireland, 31, 52
Irish penal code for Roman Catho
lics, 3
Japan, 37, 51
Jowett, Mr., his book, The Passion
for Souls quoted, 132 ; his views
of the ministry, 133
Laud, Archbishop, 3
Leo XIII, his character, 213 ; his
encyclicals, 213 ; appoints a
commission to inquire into
Anglican orders, 214, 215 ;
appeals to Eastern Christians,
224
Liturgical system, a secondary
feature of the Church's life, 69 ;
services and systems, 202, 228
Liverpool, 31
Loisy, L'Abbe, 217
London, Tower of, 24
Luther, Martin, 234
Mackenzie, Rev. Peter, his or
dination, 131
Maclagan, Archbishop, on Re
union, 214
Manning, Cardinal, his descrip
tion of Protestants he had
known, 27 ; his view of Protest
ant grace, 139 ; Romans as Non
conformists, 208 ; on Roman in
action in England, 220
Mass, 23 et seq.
Meyer, Rev. F. B., on Free Church
Bishops, 151 ; his recommenda
tion, 161 ; a description by him,
203
Ministry, the Christian, principles
of, 115 et seq. ; indispensable to
Christianity, 120 ; functions of,
123 ; Anglican theory and prac
tice, 16; Nonconformists' theory
and practice, 129 et seq.; Free

Church Catechism on, 137 ; one
of its chief principles, 173, 175;
and unity, 182
Missions and Missionaries, Mora
vian , 50 ; Roman Catholic, 50 ;
Anglican, 52; Jesuit Fathers,
52 ; China, Inland, 53 ; Protes
tant, 54; S.P.G., 55; C.M.S.,
55 ; power lost by Anglican
missions being all sectional or
private societies, 54 ; Pharisees
as missionaries, 57 ; Noncon
formist bodies unite for Foreign
Mission work, 65
Mivart, St. George, 218
Modernists, 157
Mohammedanism, 15
Moravian Missionaries, 50 ; their
Creed or Confession of Faith,
66
NAG'S Head, Cheapside, a fable,
212
Newbolt, Canon, 64
Newman, Cardinal, 185, 211, 216
" Nicene " Creed, 244
Nonconformity, 3, 44, 60, 61 ;
reality of its doctrinal differ
ences from the Church, 62 ;
Roman and Protestant, 67 ; atti
tude to Unitarianism, 68 ; the
Incarnation and Sacraments,
69 ; its attitude to Calvinism,
72, 85 ; attitude towards Ca
tholicism, Puritanism, 85 et seq. ;
attitude towards art, 91 ; neither
Calvinistic, anti - Catholic, or
anti-artistic, 93 ; attitude to
wards Baptism in practice, 102;
anti-sacramental tendency, 107,
113 ; views as to the Ministry,
115, 129; training colleges for
ministers, 131, 133; growth and
extent of its ministry, 137 ; the
Sacraments, 139 et seq. ; attitude
towards Episcopate, 146, 151,
152 ; decay of Calvinism, 154 ;
rejection of Verbal Inspiration,
155 ; rejection of the principle
of continuity, 169, 170, 172;
implications, 171 ; the ministry,
175 ; double barrier between it
and the Church 183; possi-

INDEX

251

bilities of joint-action, 190 et
seq.; study of Anglican theology,
199 ; Evangelical fervour, 204 ;
value of their protest as regards
certain dangers, 204 et seq.
Orders, Anglican, Roman de
cision in 1704, 212 ; reopened
1895, 213 ; the French canonists'
interest in, 211; declared in
valid at Rome, 215
Ordination, 123, 126, 144
Peacemaker, his task two-fold,
22
Pharisee, constant danger of
Christians becoming, 6 ; as
missionaries, 57
Pillory, the, 3
Pius X, 42
Plymouth Brethren, 66
Politics, retrograde, effects in
religion, 31
Portal, L'Abbe, 213
Prayer Book, proscribed, 3 ; suffi
ciently proclaims the teaching
of the Church of England, 64
Presbyterianism, reasons for it not
suiting England, 146
Presbyterians, 66, 116, 146
Protestant, connotations of, need
patient thought, 27
Prynne, 3
Puritanism, its leading ideas, 71
Quakers, the, 42, 58
Rashdall, Dr., 64
Reform, difficulty of religious, 6 ;
hopefulness of, in Christian
bodies, 7
Reformation , the, 70 et seq.
Reformers, usual fate of, 7
Relief, distribution, disastrously
affected by disunion, 43 ; neces
sity of union, 1 90 et seq.
Representative Church Council,
197
Revue Anglo-Romaine, 213
Riots, the Gordon, 3
Roman Catholics, 66 ; Manning's
description of their attitude in
England, 220

Rome, Church of, new move
ments in, 8, 9 ; attitude towards,
criticism, history, &c, 217;
official action, 218 ; importance
to Christianity, 218 ; loss of the
Teutons, 218 ; attitude towards
English Church, 219 et seq.;
towards the great Churches of
the East, 224
Sacerdotalism, 53, 116
Sacraments, dispensed with by
thousands of Christians, 42 ;
Congregationalists' views of, in
1658, 95; Wesleyan, 105; un
satisfactory statements in the
Manual of 1864, 108 et seq. ; re
lation of Sacramental position
of the Church to a much wider
belief, 113, 114; restriction of
administration in Nonconfor
mist bodies, 130; not opposed
to preaching, 134 ; validity of,
141 ; essential character of, 182 ;
their use, 204
"Sacrament Sunday" in Scotland,
142
St. Ambrose, 153
St. Augustine, of Canterbury, 211
St. Augustine, of Hippo, a great
saying of, 164
St. Bartholomew, the massacre of,
2 ; Lord Acton on, 74
St. Catherine, of Siena, 132
St. Paul, his consideration for
Jewish prejudices, 57; the great
ness of his work, 135
Schism, 9
Schoolmen, the, 72
Seals, the, 122
Servetus, his trial at Geneva, 74
"Seventh Day Adventists," 66
Shorthouse, John, an article by,
239
Simplon tunnel, a suggestion of
method, 207
Smithfield, the fires of, 2, 24
Spurgeon, Charles, edits " Thirty-
two Articles for the Baptists," 95
Star Chamber, the, 3
Strossmayer, Bishop, his declara
tion about Protestantism, 28
Succession (see Apostolic)

252 THE CHURCH AND NONCONFORMITY

Sunday schools, necessity of some
joint action about, 194 et seq.
Swedenborgians, 66
Synods, 147
Tabernacle, the, 168, 169
Terms of communion, 228, 229 ;
the example of the Apostles in
regard to St. Thomas, 238 ; con
sequences of the attempt to
narrow, 242 et seq.
Test Act, 3
Theodore, Archbishop, 52
Thirty Years' War, 2
Toleration, Reformation ideas of,
90
Training of ordination candidates,
131
Transubstantiation, 179, 236
Trinity, doctrine of the Blessed,
in its relation to our disunion,
17
Turner, Mr. C. H., his contribution
to the Camb. Med. Hist., 125
Ullathorne, Bishop, 216
Dndenominationalism, the com
mon enemy, 206
Unitarianism, 68
Unity, long lost, 4 ; essential, in

destructible, 10 ; a desire for,
29, 30 ; variations which must
be permitted and encouraged,38
Usher, Professor, his description
of Puritans and Anglicans, 71
Validity, of ministry) 138; of
sacraments, 139 ; Roman view of,
expressed by Cardinal Manning,
139 ; difficulty of acceptance,
140; meaning of "validity," 141
Vaughan, Cardinal, 214
Wales, 31
Walker, author of The Sufferings
of the Clergy, 25
Walsingham, 24
WesleyaDS, the, 66, 115 ; theory
and practice as to baptism,
specially infant, 101 ; use of the
Church Catechism with a dif
ference, 101 ; their statements
as to sacraments very Anglican,
105
Whitgift, Archbishop, contends
with Cartwright, 86
William of Orange, his work more
political than religious, 209
Zwinglianism, 179, 180, 236

Printed by Ballantyne Hanson &¦= Co.,
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Mr. Edward Arnold's List of
Theological Books.

Devotional
JESUS SALVATOR MUNDI : Some
Lenten Thoughts on Salvation. By the Rev. J. H. Beibitz,
Rector of Shelsley Beauchamp and Shelsley Walsh, Wor
cester ; late Vice- Principal of the Theological College,
Lichfield. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net.
There are few tasks more important than that of subjecting our ordinary
religious ideas to a thoroughgoing analysis. Only so can they become real
to us, and gain, or regain, the power of directing and moulding our lives.
This little book represents an attempt to fulfil this task in regard to the
fundamental Christian conception of our salvation through and in Jesus
Christ ; in other words, to answer the question in what sense, and by what
means, are we ' saved ' ?
THE SAINTS' APPEAL. By the Rev. S. A.
Alexander, Canon and Treasurer of St. Paul's; Author of
' The Mind of Christ,' etc. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. net.
It is hoped that, while suitable for devotional reading throughout the year,
the book will be found especially helpful as a companion for quiet hours in Lent.
It consists of a selection of the sermons preached by Canon Alexander last year
to very large congregations in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday afternoons.
They are an attempt to show the romance and heroism of the Christian life,
to bring the mystical and spiritual side of it into closer touch with ordinary,
practical affairs, and to illustrate in general ways the power and fascination
both of the belief and of the character of those who have endeavoured to live
that higher life under many different conditions of society.
THE CROWN OF THORNS. By the Rev.
A. E. Burn, Vicar of Halifax, Prebendary of Gaia Major
in Lichfield Cathedral ; Author of ' An Introduction to the
Creeds and the Te Deum,' etc. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
This is a course of meditations for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, repre
senting the substance of teaching given to many town congregations during
the last ten years.
' Dr. Burn's addresses are full of solid instruction and thoughts which
may foster devotion.' — Church Times.
' While the tone is truly devotional, touched here and there with the
secret we call mystical, there is a thought in every sermon for the intellect to
find pleasure in.' — Expository Times.
LONDON ; EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W.

l»r. eduwd Arnolds Cist

Scriptural Interpretation and
Commentary
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
SYNOPTIC PROBLEM. By the Rev. Eric
Rede Buckley, Vicar of Burley-in-Wharfedale, Proctor in
Convocation. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
This book gives the main results of recent research as to the literary origin
and composition of the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke. A
distinctive feature of it is that all the more important passages on which the
rguments rest are printed in full in English, thus relieving the reader of the
necessity of constant reference to his Bible or Greek Testament. Besides
giving a careful explanation of the theories most widely accepted by contem
porary critics, the author has stated some alternative theories which seem
worthy of consideration.
THE OLD TESTAMENT. By the Rev.
H. C. O. Lanchester, Rector of Sail. Crown 8vo.
2s. 6d. net.
An attempt to place the general reader in a better position for the intelli
gent study of the Old Testament. The main results of the Higher Criticism
are frankly accepted, and it is recognized that this movement has been
fraught with considerable perils to faith ; but the writer endeavours to point
out that modern studies have resulted in a broadening, rather than in an
evaluation, of a reasonable faith. Some account is given of the historical
background of the Old Testament, and of the assistance which recent
researches have afforded to the study of it.
THE MIND OF ST. PAUL : As Illus
trated by his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. By Canon
H. L. Goudge, D.D., Principal of Ely Theological College.
2s. 6d. net.
' In a singularly lofty and spiritual book, Dr. Goudge, of Ely, handles
with much insight and courage some urgent practical problems. Amidst
the flood of small books on theology this one should survive.' — Church
Family Newspaper.
MIRACLES IN THE NEW TESTA=
MENT: A Study of Evidence. By the Rev. J. M.
Thompson, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Third
Impression. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

or Cbeological Books

S. PAUL IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN
RESEARCH. By the Rev. J. R. Cohu, Rector of
Aston Clinton, Bucks ; sometime Fellow of Jesus College,
Oxford. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
* The treatment in every chapter is profoundly thoughtful, but exceedingly
lucid in expression. The book is a real contribution to the literature of
divinity.' — Homiktic Review.
THE BOOK OF BOOKS : A Study of the
Bible. By Canon Lonsdale Ragg, B.D., Rector of
Tickencote and Prebendary of Buckden in Lincoln Cathedral.
Crown 8vo. Cloth. 5s. net.
¦ Mr. Ragg's volume is a timely and welcome piece of work. The author
is an orthodox High Churchman, whose leanings are fundamentally traditional.
His mind, however, is open to new light, and he sees clearly that the old-
fashioned view of Scripture can no longer be held in face of the difficulties
which modern investigation has brought to light. Yet this has meant no
abandonment of his reverence for Scripture, no surrender of the claim which
he makes for its uniqueness. His work will be found helpful by many who
are conscious that great changes are required, but who are also conscious that
the Bible must hold a solitary place in their affection and allegiance.' —
Holborn Review.
THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. By
Robert Hatch Kennett, D.D., Canon of Ely, and Regius
Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge.
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
' Professor Kennett's work is marked by such qualities of originality
and acuteness that it is always with expectation that we take up a book or
article by him. The present volume contains simply four lectures delivered
to the clergy in Cambridge, so that in the main it is a statement designed for
educated readers rather than for experts. His results, however, and such
indication of processes as can be given are of unusual interest, and his dis
cussion will be found very stimulating.' — Holborn, Review.
IN OUR TONGUES : Some Hints to Readers
of the English Bible. By Robert Hatch Kennett, D.D.
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
OUTLINES OF THE SYNOPTIC
RECORD. By the Rev. Bernard Hugh Bosanquet,
Vicar of Thames Ditton, and R. A. Wenham. Crown 8vo. 6s.

W)r. €dUwd HrnoWs £ist

The Work of the Clergy
HOW TO DEAL WITH LADS : A Hand
book of Church Work. By Canon Peter Green. With a
Preface by the Right Rev. Lord Bishop of Gloucester.
Crown 8vo., cloth. 2s. 6d. net.
' We have seldom read a volume of the nature of the present treatise with
such unmixed pleasure as we have received from a perusal of Mr. Green's
excellent work. There is a freshness about the whole treatment of the subject
which is most stimulating.' — Church Times.
HOW TO DEAL WITH MEN : A Hand-
book of Church Work. By the Rev. Peter Green, M.A.,
Canon of Manchester, Rector of Sacred Trinity, Salford.
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
THE CHURCH AND MODERN PROB=
LEMS. By the Rev. C. F. Garbett, M.A., Vicar of
Portsea. 3s. 6d. net.
' We can confidently recommend the volume to those who wish to clear
their views and see how a well-informed and sympathetic working clergyman
boldly and manfully faces hard questions.' — Church Family Newspaper.
PREACHERS AND TEACHERS. By
James Gilliland Simpson, D.D. , Canon of St. Paul's; recently
Principal of Leeds Clergy School. 5s. net.
' The whole book may be profitably studied both by preachers and hearers. '
— Church Times.
THE CLERGY AND SOCIAL SER=
VICE. Cambridge Lectures on Pastoral Theology. By
the Very Rev. W. Moore Ede, D.D., Dean of Worcester.
Crown 8vo., cloth. 2s. 6d. net.
THE ART OF READING AND
SPEAKING. By James Fleming, B.D., late Vicar
of St. Michael's, Chester Square, London. Ninth Impres
sion. Crown 8vo., cloth. 3s. 6d.

of etiological Books

Ecclesiastical History and Biography
THE PARTING OF THE ROADS :
Studies in the Development of Judaism and Early Chris
tianity. By Members of Jesus College, Cambridge.
With an Introduction by W. R. Inge, D.D., late Pro
fessorial Fellow, now Honorary Fellow of the College and
Dean of St. Paul's. Edited by F. J. Foakes Jackson, D.D.,
Fellow and Dean of the College. Demy Svo. ios. 6d. net.
THE SPIRIT OF POWER: The Church in
the Early Second Century. By the Rev. Ernest A.
Edghill, M.A., B.D., Sub-Warden of the College of St.
Saviour in Southwark ; Hulsean Lecturer in the University
of Cambridge. 5s. net.
THEODORE OF STUDIUM : His Life and
Times. By Alice Gardner, Associate and Lecturer of
Newnham College, Cambridge. With Illustrations, ios. 6d.
net.
CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE
(1300=1907). By Arthur Galton, Vicar of Edenham,
and Chaplain to the Earl of Ancaster. 12s. 6d. net.
JERUSALEM UNDER THE HIGH
PRIESTS : Five Lectures on the Period between
Nehemiah and the New Testament. By Edwyn Bevan.
7s. 6d.
' These lectures deserve careful study by everyone interested in the history
of how Hellenism and Judaism first came into contact. ' — Cambridge Review.
A MEMOIR OF THE VERY REV.
EDWARD CHARLES WICKHAM, Dean of
Lincoln, and formerly Head Master of Wellington College.
By Canon Lonsdale Ragg. With Illustrations. 7s. 6d. net.
' A very readable memoir.' — Spectator.

ti)v. €du?ard Arnold's Ost

A SEKIES OF SHOUT LIVES OF SAINTLY MEN
FRANCIS: THE LITTLE POOR MAN
OF ASSISI. By the Hon. and Rev. James Adderley.
With Portrait of St. Francis. 3s. 6d.
MONSIEUR VINCENT: A Short Life of
St. Vincent de Paul. By the same Author. With Portrait.
3s. 6d.
HUGH OF LINCOLN. By Charles Marson,
Vicar of Hambridge, Taunton. With Portrait. 3s. 6d.
Mission Work
EIGHTEEN YEARS IN UGANDA
AND EAST AFRICA. By Alfred R. Tucker,
D.D., formerly Bishop of Uganda. With Illustrations by
the Author. Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
' This complete and official episcopal narrative surpasses in interest and
authority all the smaller volumes hitherto published.' — Times.
A PARSON IN THE AUSTRALIAN
BUSH. By the Rev. C. H. S. Matthews, M.A., late
Vice-Principal of the Brotherhood of the Good Shepherd,
N.S.W. Fully Illustrated. 3s. 6d. net.
Social Work
ACROSS THE BRIDGES : A Study of
Social Life in South London. By Alexander Paterson.
With Preface by the Bishop of Southwark. New and
Cheaper Edition. Cloth, 2s. net ; paper, is. net.
LETTERS FROM A SETTLEMENT.
By Miss A. L. Hodson. Illustrated. 4s. 6d. net.
¦ The letters were well worth publishing, and prove the great good which
is accomplished by a well-organized Settlement.' — Athenaum.

of etiological Books

MISS LOAME'S BOOKS
' We would not merely recommend, but would urge, their attentive perusal
upon all men and women who are concerned with the question of poor relief,
and who are sincerely anxious to help the people without harming them.'
— Spectator.
THE COMMON GROWTH. By M. Loane.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
THE QUEEN'S POOR : Life as they find it
in Town and Country. 3s. 6d.
NEIGHBOURS AND FRIENDS. 6s.
AN ENGLISHMAN'S CASTLE. 6s.
Philosophy and Religion
CATHOLICISM AND THE MODERN
MIND : A Contribution to Religious Study and Progress.
With a Prefatory Letter to Pope Pius X. By Malcolm
Quin, Author of 'Aids to Worship,' ' Notes on a Progressive
Catholicism,' etc. Crown Svo. 7s. 6d. net.
FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY.
By F. M. Cornford, Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College,
Cambridge. Demy 8vo. ios. 6d. net.
Mr. Cornford's theory is that the originators of Greek philosophy did
not, as is usually supposed, turn their backs wholly on religion and go direct
to their own consciousness and the world around them for data for an ex
planation of the universe ; but that at the very outset of their investigations
they in fact, though unconsciously, took over certain fundamental concep
tions — those of Nature, God, and Soul — from the religious system which they
believed themselves to have got rid of. In an elaborate and brilliant argument
he traces back these conceptions to their roots in the ' collective mind ' of
primitive pre-religious man, and then, having established his theory, applies
it to the explanation of the subsequent history of religious and philosophic
thought, on which it throws a flood of new light.
THE FAITH OF AN AVERAGE MAN.
By the Rev. Charles H. S. Matthews, M.A., Author of
' A Parson in the Australian Bush,' etc. 3s. 6d. net.

8  i»r. Cdujard flrnold^Osj 
SOME DOGMAS OF RELIGION. By
J. M. E. McTaggart, Litt.D., Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity
College, Cambridge ; Author of ' Studies in the Hegelian
Dialectic," etc. Demy 8vo. ios. 6d. net.
A REPORTED CHANGE OF RE-
LIGION. By Onyx. 3s. 6d.
SOME PROBLEMS OF EXISTENCE.
By Norman Pearson. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
THE DIARY OF A MODERNIST. By
William Scott Palmer, Author of 'An Agnostic's Pro
gress,' etc. Crown 8vo., cloth. 5s. net.
1 It is a reconstructive and creative book ; above all, it is a spiritual book,
and it kindles in others that fire of the spirit by which the author has been
illuminated and warmed. It is a long time since we have met with a volume
of its kind which is so suggestive, so truly inspired in thought, so interesting
and attractive in style.' — Spectator.
Miscellaneous
A GOODLY FELLOWSHIP : Thoughts in
Prose and Verse from many Sources. Collected by Rose E.
Selfe. With a Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
2s. 6d. net.
THE ROMANCE OF THE HOLY
LAND. By Dr. Charles Leach, M.P. With numerous
Illustrations. 7s. 6d. net.
PATROLLERS °F PALESTINE. By
the Rev. Haskett _ - M.A., F.R.G.S., Editor of
'Murray's Handbook to Syria. . id Palestine,' 1902; Author
of 'The Divine Epiphany,' 'Calvary and the Tomb of
Christ,' etc. With Illustrations. Large crown Svo. ios. 6d.
LETTERS TO A GODCHILD. By Alice
Gardner, Associate and Lecturer of Newnham College,
Cambridge. 2s. 6d. net.

LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W.

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