Part 12

On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was inevitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, but they were not the foundation. When they came, the danger of the Christian Church was that she should take them for the foundation. The people who were built on the real foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's good news, naturally, as they came to know of one another's existence, as their relations with one another multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of a common treasure deepened,--naturally, I say, drew together in one body, with an organisation growing out of the needs of a growing body. It is quite clear that the more strongly Christians felt their common business in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of God, the more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society for this business, with the natural and true notion that the acting together in this way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, presents fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a more animating force of sympathy and mutual assurance, than the acting separately. Only the sense of differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat this tendency.

Dr. Newman has told us what an impression was once made upon his mind by the sentence: _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_. We have shown how, for matters of philosophical judgment, not yet settled but requiring development to clear them, the consent of the world, at a time when this clearing development cannot have happened, seems to carry little or no weight at all; indeed, as to judgment on these points, we should rather be inclined to lay down the very contrary of Dr. Newman's affirmation, and to say: _Securus delirat orbis terrarum_. But points of speculative theology being out of the question, and the practical ground and purpose of man's religion being broadly and plainly fixed, we should be quite disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, that _securus =colit= orbis terrarum_;--those pursue this purpose best who pursue it together. For unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church's growth shows, to pursue it together.

Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which may co-exist with separation, and they say: 'There are four evangelists, yet one gospel; why should there not be many separate religious bodies, yet one Church?' But their theory of unity in separation is a theory palpably invented to cover existing facts, and their argument from the evangelists is a paralogism. For the Four Gospels arose out of no thought of divergency; they were not designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one another; they were concurring testimonies borne to the same fact. But the several religious bodies of Christendom plainly grew out of an intention of divergency; clearly they were designed to correct the imperfections of one prior church and of each other; and to say of things sprung out of discord that they may make _one_, because things sprung out of concord may make _one_, is like saying that because several agreements may make a peace, therefore several wars may make a peace too. No; without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it.

All that Dr. Newman has so excellently said about development applies here legitimately and fully. Existence justifies additions and stages in existence. The living edifice planted on the foundation, _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity_, could not but grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but make developments, and all developments not inconsistent with the aim of its original foundation, and not extending beyond the moral and practical sphere which was the sphere of its original foundation, are legitimated by the very fact of the Church having in the natural evolution of its life and growth made them. A boy does not wear the clothes or follow the ways of an infant, nor a man those of a boy; yet they are all engaged in the one same business of developing their growing life, and to the clothes to be worn and the ways to be followed for the purpose of doing this, nature will, in general, direct them safely. The several scattered congregations of the first age of Christianity coalesced into one community, just as the several scattered Christians had earlier still coalesced into congregations. Why?--because such was the natural course of things. It had nothing inconsistent with the fundamental ground of Christians, _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity_; and it was approved by their growing and enlarging in it. They developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, which was not that of the first times; they developed church-usages, such as the practice of infant baptism, which were not those of the first times; they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies which were not those of the first times;--they developed all these, just as they developed a church-architecture which was not that of the first times, because they were no longer in the first times, and required for their expanding growth what suited their own times. They coalesced with the State because they grew by doing so. They called the faith they possessed in common the _Catholic_, that is, the general or universal faith. They developed, also, as we have seen, dogma or a theological philosophy. Both dogma and discipline became a part of the Catholic faith, or profession of the general body of Christians.

Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life for itself, the Church, as has been said, had necessarily, like every other living thing, the requisite qualifications; to develop scientific dogma it had not. But even of the dogma which the Church developed it may be said, that, from the very nature of things, it was probably, as compared with the opposing dogma over which it prevailed, the more suited to the actual condition of the Church's life, and to the due progress of the divine work for which she existed. For instance, whatever may be scientifically the rights of the question about grace and free-will, it is evident that, for the Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was the less inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense of _being in the divine hand_ was the feeling which it was good for Christians to be filled with. Whatever may be scientifically the merits of the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, for the Church of their time whatever most exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus Christ was clearly the profitable doctrine, the doctrine most helpful to that moral life which was the true life of the Church.

People, however, there were in abundance who differed on points both of discipline and of dogma from the rule which obtained in the Church, and who separated from her on account of that difference. These were the heretics: _separatists_, as the name implies, _for the sake of opinions_. And the very name, therefore, implies that they were wrong in separating, and that the body which held together was right; because the Church exists, not for the sake of opinions, but for the sake of moral practice, and a united endeavour after this is stronger than a broken one. Valentinians, Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Manichæans, Novatians, Eutychians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians,--if they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, because for developing its own fit outward conditions of life the body of a community has, as we have seen, a real natural power, and individuals are bound to sacrifice their fancies to it; if they separated on points of dogma they were wrong also, because, while neither they nor the Church had the means of determining such points adequately, the true instinct lay in those who, instead of separating for such points, conceded them as the Church settled them, and found their bond of union, where it in truth really was, not in notions about the co-eternity of the Son, but in the principle: _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity_.

Does any one imagine that all the Church shared Augustine's speculative opinions about grace and predestination? that many members of it did not rather incline, as a matter of speculative opinion, to the notions of Pelagius? Does any one imagine that all who stood with the Church and did not join themselves to the Arians, were speculatively Athanasians? It was not so; but they had a true feeling for what purpose the Gospel and the Church were given them, and for what they were not given them; they could see that 'impious and pious living,' according to that sentence of Epiphanius we have quoted from Hammond, 'divided the whole Christian world into erroneous and orthodox;' and that it was not worth while to suffer themselves to be divided for anything else.

And though it will be said that separatists for opinions on points of discipline and dogma have often asserted, and sometimes believed, that piety and impiety were vitally concerned in these points; yet here again the true religious instinct is that which discerns,--what is seldom so very obscure,--whether they are in truth thus vitally concerned or not; and, if they are not, cannot be perverted into fancying them concerned and breaking unity for them. This, I say, is the true religious instinct, the instinct which most clearly seizes the essence and aim of the Christian Gospel and of the Christian Church. But fidelity to it leaves, also, the way least closed to the admission of true developments of speculative thought, when the time is come for them, and to the incorporation of these true developments with the ideas and practice of Christians.

Is there not, then, any separation which is right and reasonable? Yes, separation on plain points of morals. For these involve the very essence of the Christian Gospel, and the very ground on which the Christian Church is built. The sale of indulgences, if deliberately instituted and persisted in by the main body of the Church, afforded a valid reason for breaking unity; the doctrine of purgatory, or of the real presence, did not.

However, a cosmopolitan church-order, commenced when the political organisation of Christians was also cosmopolitan,--when, that is, the nations of Europe were politically one in the unity of the Roman Empire,--might well occasion difficulties as the nations solidified into independent states with a keen sense of their independent life; so that, the cosmopolitan type disappearing for civil affairs, and being replaced by the national type, the same disappearance and replacement tended to prevail in ecclesiastical affairs also. But this was a political difficulty, not a religious one, and it raised no insuperable bar to continued religious union. A Church with Anglican liberties might very well, the English national spirit being what it is, have been in religious communion with Rome, and yet have been safely trusted to maintain and develop its national liberties to any extent required.

The moral corruptions of Rome, on the other hand, were a real ground for separation. On their account, and solely on their account, if they could not be got rid of, was separation not only lawful but necessary. It has always been the averment of the Church of England, that the change made in her at the Reformation was the very least change which was absolutely necessary. No doubt she used the opportunity of her breach with Rome to get rid of several doctrines which the human mind had outgrown; but it was the immoral practice of Rome that really moved her to separation. And she maintained that she merely got rid of Roman corruptions which were immoral and intolerable, and remained the old, historic, Catholic Church of England still.

The right to this title of _Catholic_ is a favourite matter of contention between bodies of Christians. But let us use names in their customary and natural senses. To us it seems that unless one chooses to fight about words, and fancifully to put into the word _Catholic_ some occult quality, one must allow that the changes made in the Church of England at the Reformation impaired its Catholicity. The word _Catholic_ was meant to describe the common or general profession and worship of Christendom at the time when the word arose. Undoubtedly this general profession and worship had not a strict uniformity everywhere, but it had a clearly-marked common character; and this well-known type Bede, or Anselm, or Wiclif himself, would to this day easily recognise in a Roman Catholic religious service, but hardly in an Anglican; while, on the other hand, in a Roman Catholic religious service an ordinary Anglican finds himself as much in a strange world and out of his usual course, as in a Nonconformist meeting-house. Something precious was no doubt lost in losing this common profession and worship; but the loss was, as we Protestants maintain, incurred for the sake of something yet more precious still,--the purity of that moral practice which was the very cause for which the common profession and worship existed. Now, it seems captious to incur voluntarily a loss for a great and worthy object, and at the same time, by a conjuring with words, to try and make it appear that we have not suffered the loss at all. So on the word _Catholic_ we will not insist too jealously; but thus much, at any rate, must be allowed to the Church of England,--that she kept enough of the past to preserve, as far as this nation was concerned, her continuity, to be still the _historic Church of England_; and that she avoided the error, to which there was so much to draw her, and into which all the other reformed Churches fell, of making improved speculative doctrinal opinions the main ground of her separation.

A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching the Church with what is, in our opinion, her greatest praise, namely, that on points of doctrinal theology she is 'a Church that does not know her own mind,' roundly asserts, as we have already mentioned, that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' But not only does the whole course of Church-history disprove such an assertion, and show that this is what the Puritans always wanted to make the Church, and what the Church would never be made, but we can disprove it, too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans themselves. At the Savoy Conference the Puritans urged that 'our first reformers out of their great wisdom did at that time (of the Reformation) so compose the Liturgy, as to win upon the Papists, and to draw them into their Church communion _by varying as little as they could from the Romish forms before in use_;' and this they alleged as their great plea for purging the Liturgy. And the Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the reformers as the essential policy of the Church of England; as indeed it was, and till this day has continued to be. No; the Church of England did not give her energies to inventing a new church-order for herself and fighting for it; to singling out two or three speculative dogmas as the essence of Christianity, and fighting for them. She set herself to carry forward, and as much as possible on the old lines, the old practical work and proper design of the Christian Church; and this is what left her mind comparatively open, as we have seen, for the admission of philosophy and criticism, as they slowly developed themselves outside the Church and filtered into her; an admission which confessedly proves just now of capital importance.

This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared with the Church, and how _should_ they have shared it? They are founded on the negation of that idea of development which plays so important a part in the life of the Church; on the assumption that there is a divinely appointed church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, and that they have adopted it; that there is a doctrinal scheme of faith, justification, and imputed righteousness, which is the test of a standing or falling church and the essence of the gospel, and that they have extracted it. These are assumptions which, as they make union impossible, so also make growth impossible. The Church makes church-order a matter of ecclesiastical constitution, is founded on moral practice, and though she develops speculative dogma, does not allow that this or that dogma is the essence of Christianity.

'Congregational Nonconformists,' say the Independents, 'can never be incorporated into an organic union with Anglican Episcopacy, because there is not even the shadow of an outline of it in the New Testament, and it is our assertion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles have given us all the laws that are necessary for the constitution and government of the Church.'[108] 'Whatever may come,' says the President of the Wesleyan Conference, 'we are determined to be simple, earnest preachers of _the gospel_. Whatever may come, we are determined to be true to _Scriptural Protestantism_. We would be friendly with all evangelical churches, but we will have no fellowship with the man of sin. We will give up life itself rather than be unfaithful to _the truth_. It is ours to cry everywhere: "Come, sinners, to _the gospel-feast_!"' And this _gospel_, this _Scriptural Protestantism_, this _truth_, is the doctrine of justification by 'pleading solely the blood of the covenant,' of which we have said so much. Methodists cannot unite with a church which does not found itself on this doctrine of justification, but which holds the doctrine of priestly absolution, of the real presence, and other doctrines of like stamp; Congregationalists cannot unite with a church which, besides not resting on the doctrine of justification, has a church-order not prescribed in the New Testament.

[Footnote 108: Address of the Rev. G. W. Conder at Liverpool, in the _Lancashire Congregational Calendar_ for 1869-70.]

Now as Hooker truly says of those who 'desire to draw all things unto the determination of bare and naked Scripture,' as Dr. Newman, too, has said, and as many others have said, the Bible does not exhibit, drawn out in black and white, the precise tenets and usages of any Christian society; some inference and criticism must be employed to get at them. 'For the most part, even such as are readiest to cite for one thing five hundred sentences of Scripture, what warrant have they that any one of them doth mean the thing for which it is alleged?' Nay, 'it is not the word of God itself which doth, or possibly can, assure us that we do well to think it his word.' So says Hooker, and what he says is perfectly true. A process of reasoning and collection is necessary to get at the Scriptural church-discipline and the Scriptural Protestantism of the Puritans; in short, this discipline and this doctrine are developments. And the first is an unsound development, in a line where there was a power of making a true development, and where the Church made it; the second is an unsound development in a line where neither the Church nor Puritanism had the power of making true developments. But as it is the truth of its Scriptural Protestantism which in Puritanism's eyes especially proves the truth of its Scriptural church-order which has this Protestantism, and the falsehood of the Anglican church-order which has much less of it, to abate the confidence of the Puritans in their Scriptural Protestantism is the first step towards their union, so much to be desired, with the national Church.

We say, therefore, that the doctrine: 'It is agreed between God and the mediator Jesus Christ the Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and he both condemned and put to death for them upon this very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the covenant of reconciliation offered through Christ shall, by the imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified and holden righteous before God,'--we say that this doctrine is as much a human development from the text, 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,' as the doctrine of priestly absolution is a human development from the text, 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them,' or the doctrine of the real presence from the text, 'Take, eat, this is my body.' In our treatise on St. Paul we have shown at length that the received doctrine of justification is an unsound development. It may be said that the doctrine of priestly absolution and of the real presence are unsound developments also. True, in our opinion they are so; they are, like the doctrine of justification, developments made under conditions which precluded the possibility of sound developments in this line. But the difference is here: the Church of England does not identify Christianity with these unsound developments; she does not call either of them _Scriptural Protestantism_, or _truth_, or _the gospel_; she does not insist that all who are in communion with her should hold them; she does not repel from her communion those who hold doctrines at variance with them. She treats them as she does the received doctrine of justification, to which she does not tie herself up, but leaves people to hold it if they please. She thus provides room for growth and further change in these very doctrines themselves. But to the doctrine of justification Puritanism ties itself up, just as it tied itself up formerly to the doctrine of predestination; it calls it _Scriptural Protestantism_, _truth_, _the gospel_; it will have communion with none who do not hold it; it repels communion with any who hold the doctrines of priestly absolution and the real presence, because they seem to interfere with it. Yet it is really itself no better than they. But how can growth possibly find place in this doctrine, while it is held in such a fashion?

Every one who perceives and values the power contained in Christianity, must be struck to see how, at the present moment, the progress of this power seems to depend upon its being able to disengage itself from speculative accretions that encumber it. A considerable movement to this end is visible in the Church of England. The most nakedly speculative, and therefore the most inevitably defective, parts of the Prayer Book,--the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles,--our generation will not improbably see the Prayer Book rid of. But the larger the body in which this movement works, the greater is the power of the movement. If the Church of England were disestablished to-day it would be desirable to re-establish her to-morrow, if only because of the immense power for development which a national body possesses. It is because we know something of the Nonconformist ministers, and what eminent force and faculty many of them have for contributing to the work of development now before the Church, that we cannot bear to see the waste of power caused by their separatism and battling with the Establishment, which absorb their energies too much to suffer them to carry forward the work of development themselves, and cut them off from aiding those in the Church who carry it forward.