Part 4

This, then, is really the rate at which each body “is advancing in the path of self extension;” and the best proof of its accuracy is, that it exactly tallies with what one would have expected beforehand. Mr. Mann’s tables, on the contrary, are absolutely incredible. We must never forget, that during the Great Rebellion, Puritanism was actually the dominant faction; and even at the Restoration it cannot be supposed that the Dissenters were a small or an uninfluential class. In 1662 no fewer than 2,000 ministers were ejected under the new Act of Uniformity; and as at the last census there were only 6405 professional Protestant Ministers, it will be seen that the ejected preachers alone formed a larger body, in comparison with the existing population, than the Protestant Dissenting Ministry does now. It cannot be doubted that every one of those men had a greater or less following; and it must be remembered that in the days of the Commonwealth there was always a rabble of sects who might even then be called Dissenters. It is true that, after the Restoration, Nonconformity was subjected to severe repressive laws, but those laws were not enforced with unvarying rigour. In 1672 there was the Indulgence, and in 1681 the House of Commons passed a strong resolution against the prosecution of Protestant Dissenters. Besides, after all, the Conventicle Acts only continued in force about 23 years—not much longer, in fact, than Episcopacy had been proscribed by law. The natural result which would follow the famous proclamation of James II., and the subsequent passing of the Toleration Act, would be a great and sudden revival of Dissent. How small was the church-feeling of Parliament at the Revolution may be gathered from a curious fact mentioned in Mr. Macaulay’s third volume. It was proposed that the Commons should sit on Easter Monday. The Churchmen vigorously protested against the innovation; but they did not dare to divide, and the House did sit on the festival in question. Without at all straining the inference to be drawn from this incident, it would be difficult, indeed, to suppose that Churchmen had matters their own way. Even under the penal laws, the Dissenters must have been a large body; for James the Second’s scheme for forming a coalition of Roman Catholic and Protestant Dissenters against the Establishment would have been stark folly unless the two bodies, when combined, would have made up, at least, a powerful minority. From the Revolution to 1801 the Dissenters had more than a century to increase and multiply; and all the circumstances of the case were in their favour. Worn out by the political struggles of a century and a half, during which she had been made the tool of contending factions; deprived of her Legislative powers; silenced and frowned upon by the powers that were, the Church had sunk into that fatal lethargy from which the present generation has only just seen her awake. During that long and dreary period, all the prominent theologians, with a few bright exceptions, were either Dissenters or inclined to Dissent. The eighteenth century, too, was the golden age of popular Nonconformist preachers. Not to mention a host of smaller names, Wesley and Whitfield both rose, flourished, and died before its close. And yet, if we are to believe Mr. Mann, the Dissenters in 1801 were a much smaller body, compared with the whole population, than they were under the penal laws! {25} On the other hand, all who remember the obloquy and contempt under which the Church continued until the passing of the Reform Act, will reject, without a moment’s hesitation, the notion that, in 1831, she actually possessed more accommodation, in proportion to the population, than at the present day. The change which has taken place in the popular sentiment towards her has not been caused by any document like this Census report, which suddenly appeared and disabused the public mind of its preconceived ideas. It has, on the contrary, been brought about by the silent influence of those spectacles of zeal and self-denying liberality which have been witnessed in every corner of the land. The Church has, in fact, lived down her traducers. A hundred proverbs bear witness to the vast amount of good deeds which are required to remove an evil reputation; and yet Mr. Mann calls upon us to believe that the Establishment has achieved this, although, with all her numbers and all her wealth, she has not, since 1831, done so much as the Wesleyan sects alone, towards supplying the people with the means of religious instruction and worship! One has no language to characterize such a daring attempt on the public credulity. The most charitable hypothesis will be to conclude that Mr. Mann, though an arithmetician by his office, knows nothing about arithmetic; and so remit him to the consideration of Mr. Roebuck and the Administrative Reform Society. {26}

THE inquiry through which the reader has been invited to travel will probably suggest several considerations; and first of all the importance of putting a stop to the statistical nuisance which has of late years flourished with so rank a growth. Surely it is time that members of both Houses of Parliament, who resent so jealously any attempt on the part of Government officials to exceed or fall short of the precise instructions given them, in making returns, should raise their voices against the system of publishing with official statistics the crude, and, as it has been seen, the nonsensical but pernicious theorizings of the persons entrusted with the task of compiling reports. Like Mr. Mantalini, the majority of persons never trouble themselves to examine a numerical process, but content themselves with simply asking what is the total; and it therefore becomes the duty of Parliament to see that the unsuspecting confidence of the public is not abused. The reader must not suppose that the Report on Religious Worship is the only recent one which is open to objection. The Census Report on Schools is just as full of fallacies; and it has certainly been one of the strangest phenomena ever witnessed in the history of public discussion, that the schemes of Lord John Russell and Sir John Pakington, assailed as they were on every side, should have escaped what would, after all, have been the most effective blow that could have been aimed against them—the simple but conclusive fact, so easily deducible from the premises of the Report on Schools, that nearly as many children were under education as could be induced to attend unless they were driven to the class of the teacher by the policeman’s staff. {27}

Again, the inquiry will probably satisfy the reader that the anti-Church legislation of the day ought to proceed no further. It is easy to assign the cause which in the first instance gave it birth. Most statesmen, it may be presumed, will be ready to adopt, with regard to the multifarious sects of modern Christianity, the last clause, at least, of Gibbon’s famous dictum respecting the ancient religions of Pagan Rome—“to the people equally true, to the philosopher equally false, to the magistrate equally useful.” Persons who profess with sincerity almost any form of Christian doctrine are comparatively easy to govern; they throw but a light burden upon the poor-rate and they cost nothing at all in the shape of police. A statesman, then, might dislike Dissent, but what was he to say to a state of things like that revealed in the Census report? The Church, according to Mr. Mann’s tables, could not, by dint of the utmost exertions she is ever likely to put forth, find accommodation for half the souls who are year by year added to the population. On the other hand the Dissenters, who are far less wealthy, and have few endowments, provide without difficulty and without fuss more than twice the amount of new accommodation supplied by the Church. The irresistible inference in the mind of a mere statesman would be that Dissent ought to be aided and encouraged. But if it turns out that the facts are precisely the reverse of what has been represented—if in reality Dissent is making no progress, while the Church is providing new accommodation sufficient for the whole of the new population—why should the Legislature go out of its path to foster mere religious discord, and to impede the spread of what the country has, after all, long since recognised as the “more excellent way.” Why, for instance, should Churchrates be abolished? If they were right in 1831, when there were more Dissenters and fewer Churchmen, why are they wrong now? If Parliament has conferred upon parishes, _as a boon_, the right to tax themselves (if a majority of the ratepayers think fit) for the purpose of building and maintaining public baths, museums, and libraries, why should parishes now be deprived of a right which they possessed before there was a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a budget—before the Norman set foot upon our shores, or there was a House of Commons worthy of the name—the right to tax themselves in order to maintain edifices which may be museums second in interest to none, and which may have been centres of enlightenment long before the days of Caxton and Guttenberg?

There is another view of the case which ought not to be overlooked by statesmen who regard a religious Establishment as a mere matter of police. Granting that Dissent teaches men to be neither drunkards nor thieves, is it calculated to make them as good citizens and as good neighbours as the Church? The answer must surely be a negative. The common consent of mankind has pronounced the famous descriptions of the old Puritans in “Hudibras” to be almost as applicable to modern Dissenters as to their ancient prototypes. Nor, indeed, would it be easy, if they were not, to account for the popularity of Butler’s oft-quoted lines; for even just satires, to say nothing of unjustifiable lampoons, rarely survive the persons against whom they are directed. Of course, men are often much better than the system to which they belong. There are hundreds—nay, thousands—of Dissenters whose Dissent is a mere accident of birth and education, and who are truly catholic at heart; but of Dissent in the abstract, no one who has either studied its history or is acquainted with its practical working will deny the applicability to it not only of Butler’s portraiture, but of another yet more famous description, qualified in the latter case, however, with the insertion or omission throughout of the important word—“not.” Dissent suffers not long, and is not kind—Dissent is envious—behaves itself unseemly—vaunts itself, and is puffed up—seeks every tittle of its “rights”—is easily provoked—thinks evil—gloats over every slip on the part of its opponents—attributes what is good in them to a wrong motive—will bear nothing of which it can rid itself by agitation or clamour—will put a good construction upon nothing when an evil one is possible—hopes nothing—endures nothing. If this were not so, how would it be possible to account for its inveterate propensity to internal schism? The scriptural account of the Kingdom of Heaven is that it should grow as from a seed; but Dissent is propagated chiefly by _cuttings_. It is not yet two hundred years since the Kirk was established in Scotland, and yet there are no fewer than six sorts of Presbyterians. The case of Wesleyanism is still worse. Within sixty years after the death of its founder it had split into seven antagonistic sects. Whitfield himself quarrelled with Wesley, and his followers have, since his death, separated into two bodies. There are four sorts of Baptists. Of the Independents, Mr. Mann speaks with refreshing innocence as forming “a compact and undivided body.” It would be nearer the truth to say that they consist of nearly as many sects as there are meeting-houses. Nearly every congregation is of volcanic origin, and every one contains within it elements which might at any moment explode and shatter the whole concern.

That the writer may not be thought to be unsupported by facts, he will here summarize the history of Anabaptistic and Congregational Dissent in the first town to the annals of which he has ready access—Nottingham, his authority being Mr. Wylie’s local history, published in 1853. Nottingham, however, is a remarkably good example for the purpose. It has a manufacturing population of 57,000, having doubled itself since 1801. It is almost at the head of those places in which Dissent is most rampant, and the Church most depressed. It possessed, according to Mr. Mann’s table K, 35.2 Dissenting sittings to every hundred inhabitants, the only other places equal or superior to it in that respect being Merthyr Tydvil (52.4), Sunderland (35.2), Rochdale (36.5), and Swansea (42.8). It boasts of 74.1 per cent. of the whole religious accommodation within its boundaries, the only places having more being Merthyr (89.7), and Rochdale (78.7).

About the middle of the last century, then, the Presbyterian congregation on the High Pavement adopted Socinian tenets; and many families thereupon left it and joined a small congregation of Calvinistic Independents in Castle-gate. Their meeting-house was immediately enlarged, and it has ever since been considered the leading Dissenting place of worship. In 1761, a second secession from High Pavement, this time of Sabellians, built themselves a new meeting-house in Halifax-place. In 1801, they erected themselves a new building in St. Mary’s-gate, which has long since been closed. In 1798, a third swarm, again Calvinistic Independents, left High Pavement, and settled in the Halifax-place meeting-house, vacated by their Sabellian predecessors. In 1819, they built themselves a new meeting-house, called “Zion Chapel,” in Fletcher-gate, the old one being now a school. In 1822, a secession from Castle-gate built a new meeting-house in St. James’s-street; and six years later a secession from St. James’s-street built a meeting-house in Friar-lane. In 1804, a secession from Zion Chapel erected “Hephzibah Chapel,” which being in debt, was sold to the Universalists in 1808, and was soon afterwards converted into a National School. In 1828, another secession from “Zion Chapel” erected a meeting called “Bethesda Chapel.”

The General Baptists at first met in a disused Wesleyan meeting-house, called “The Tabernacle,” which has long since been pulled down. In 1799 they built themselves a place in Stoney-street. In 1817 a quarrel arose between Mr. Smith, the senior pastor, and his junior, of whose pulpit talents he was said to be jealous. The congregation dismissed them both, and appointed a Mr. George. On Sunday, the 3rd of August, in the same year, there was a personal conflict after the Donnybrook manner, between the partisans of Smith and George. The friends of Smith being beaten drew off, and built themselves a meeting-house in Broad-street. In 1850 there was another secession from Stoney-street, who built themselves a meeting-house on the Mansfield-road.

The Particular Baptists originally occupied an ancient meeting-house in Park-street: but in 1815 they built themselves a larger place in George-street. In 1847 there was a secession of extra-Particulars. These met first in a room in Clinton-street, then in an old building which had been disused by the Quakers, and finally, in a splendid gothic edifice, which they built for themselves on Derby-road. The old meeting-house in Park-street fell into the hands of a congregation of the Scotch variety of the sect, whose peace has only been disturbed by the Bethesdians, who joined them in 1828, until they decided upon setting up for themselves.

Thus it will be seen that of the nine new congregations enumerated above, not one was originated without a quarrel—a quarrel, too, of the worst kind, a personal one. Nobody can study the history of religious polemics without perceiving that the root of all that bitterness which has made the _odium theologicum_ a proverb, is to be found in the tendency there is in men to transfer the indignation they might reasonably feel against error, from the error itself to those who hold it. If people would only consent to forget history and would conduct the argument upon purely abstract principles, even the Roman controversy might be made instructive and edifying; but somehow, before long, the debate wanders away from the truth or falsehood of the creed under discussion to that most irrelevant of all issues, the virtues or failings of those by whom it is professed. What shall we say, then, of a system which gives rise to controversies which, from their commencement to their close, are purely personal? Lest it should be supposed that the case of Nottingham is an isolated instance, here is an extract on which the writer stumbled the other day in a tract written in praise of Congregationalism, and stated on the title page to be “commended by J. Bennett, D.D.” It appears to be quoted from a work called “The Library of Ecclesiastical Knowledge,” and the scene of the incident is stated to be “one of the principal cities of the United States:”—

A Baptist congregation, originally small, had increased so rapidly that an enlargement of the chapel became necessary. It was immediately effected. The congregation still continued to increase, and a second time it became necessary to enlarge. Everything still going on prosperously, a third enlargement, some time after, was proposed. The noble-minded pastor, however, thinking that he had already as much on his hands as any mere mortal could conscientiously discharge, with a generous contempt for his own interests, opposed this step, and suggested that they should exert themselves to raise a new interest, entirely independent of the old one. The people entered cheerfully into his design; nay, they made a nobler sacrifice than that of their money. For as soon as the new building was finished, one of the deacons, with a few of the most respectable members of the old church, voluntarily separated from it, and proceeded to form the infant _colony_ that had branched off from the mother church. What is still more delightful, the two churches formed a common fund for the erection of a third chapel. This was soon accomplished. In a short time a large and flourishing church was the result; and, at the time our informant related this fact, all three churches were actually subscribing towards a fourth chapel. This is noble conduct. Who can tell how soon cities and towns might be evangelised, if this principle were sternly (!) acted upon? A somewhat similar fact has, we understand, been recently witnessed in a city of our own country, where some congregational churches have imitated their Baptist brethren of America. When will all ministers “go and do likewise?”

This is truly edifying and amusing. First of all, mark the _habitat_ of this Nonconformist phœnix, a congregation which has actually given birth to another without a preliminary quarrel. We must actually cross the Atlantic, and seek the phenomenon in the land where the penny-a-liner places his sea-serpents, and his other choicer wonders. To increase without envy, hatred, and uncharitableness is, it seems, to a Dissenter, something inexpressibly “noble”—and brotherly love is something that must be “sternly” acted upon! We may be quite certain that it is something the congregational sects very rarely see, or it would not throw them into such lamentable, and yet, in some sense, ludicrous contortions of surprise.

Perhaps some Dissenter will be whispering, after the manner of Mr. Roebuck, the three words, Gorham, Liddell, Denison; but the _tu quoque_ wholly fails. In the first place, it is the surprising peculiarity of the present Church controversies that the noisiest, if not the weightiest, disputants are not Churchmen at all. In the next place, those who are Churchmen, and enter with any bitterness into the strife, are remarkable neither for their number nor their influence. The great party in the Church of England is, after all, the middle party; and however fierce the cannonade which the extreme left, and its allies outside the pale, may direct against the extreme right, their missiles fly harmlessly over the vast body which lies between. The truth is, the recent outburst of controversy, so far as the Church herself is responsible for it, is nothing but the natural recoil of that conservative sentiment which must always be a powerful feeling in a religious community, from doctrines and usages which had become unfamiliar. As the unfamiliarity passes away, the controversy will also gradually cease. Already the doctrines and usages in question have been unconsciously adopted by many of those who fancy themselves most opposed to them; and, indeed, if our doughtiest combatants would only take pains to understand what it is their antagonists really hold, they would often find that they are fighting against mere shadows. The recent suits in the ecclesiastical courts cannot but open the eyes of Churchmen to the extreme tenuity of the points in dispute. Take the S. Barnabas case. Everybody will remember the language which was applied to the “practices” revived by Mr. Bennett. “Popish,” “histrionic,” “mummery,” were the mildest terms in the repertory of that gentleman’s assailants. Those “practices” remain to this day—if anything, they have been elaborated rather than subjected to any mitigating process. Messrs. Westerton and Beal bring the matter before the proper tribunal; but what are the only issues they can find to raise? Such notable questions as whether the cross, which glitters on the crown, the orb, and sceptre of the Sovereign, which glows on the national banner, which crowns almost every church gable in the land, with which every Churchman is marked at his baptism, which the very Socinians place upon their buildings, is, forsooth, a lawful ornament?—whether a table ceases to be a table by being made of stone?—whether the altar which has never been moved these two hundred years, and which nobody wants to move, must nevertheless be movable?—whether the altar vestments and the “fair linen cloths” used during Communion time, may have fringes, or must be plain-hemmed? Even if Dr. Lushington’s judgment should eventually be confirmed, if in this age of schools of design, Mr. Westerton’s crusade against art should prove successful, the alterations that would be made at S. Barnabas would be discernible by none out the keenest eyes—so little can there be found in matters ritual to fight about. Even in the Denison case the points of difference are almost as infinitesimal. It is true that under the revived act of Elizabeth—compared with which the laws of Draco seem a mild and considerate code—the Archdeacon has been sentenced to lose his preferments; but his doctrine on the Real Presence has, in sober fact, never been so much as challenged. His opponents, passing over all that was material in his propositions, have only attacked a _quasi_ corollary which he has added to his main position, but which is, in reality, a complete _non-sequitur_. Whether Dr. Lushington is right or wrong, it is clear that a person holding the dogma of transubstantiation itself might, with perfect logical consistency, accept the ruling of the Court.