THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION ON DISSENT.
THE Rev. Alexander Thomson, of Manchester, who is this year Chairman of the Congregational Union, and who delivered an address in that capacity on Tuesday in the City Temple at the Holborn Viaduct, is not quite pleased with the article,—to which, however, he refers most courteously,—which appeared in these columns on 22nd May last, on " The /Esthetic Modifications of Dissent." It is evident, indeed, that the speaker himself was not very well satisfied with these aesthetic modifications. He admitted that there is a new tone among the Dissenters, and that they are disposed to take a more genial view of life than their forefathers, the Puritans, would have approved. But he was not sure that the change which had come over Nonconformists with regard to popular amusements was "wholly for the better." As regards even the architec- tural beauty now aimed at in Nonconformist places of worship, the speaker was not free from grave misgivings. In a word, he was not himself by any means inclined to welcome all the tendencies to aesthetic change on which we commented, and as a natural consequence perhaps, he appeared to be somewhat vexed with us for noticing and approving them. But what seems to have challenged his protest most, was our criticism on the much milder tone assumed by modern Dissenters towards the Church of the nation. It is true that we took some pains to disclaim any imputation on theni of ind4ing tenderness for the Establishment. Indeed, we laid stress chiefly on this,—that whereas their forefathers attacked the Episcopal organization o f the Church as prelacy, and regarded prelacy as a sort of idolatry, the Nonconformists of to-day speak of Episcopacy in the mildest terms as an experiment well worth trying, and
reserve all their hostility for that alliance between Church and State which their forefathers would have taken for granted as both righteous and necessary, provided only that the Church chosen for the purpose of that alliance had been the right one. Now this is so plain a matter of fact that we can hardly under- stand how it should challenge criticism. Mr. Thomson indeed seems to think that we accused the Dissenters of a disposition to enter the Establishment, provided that terms of comprehension could be arranged. But there he is quite mistaken. We only said that Dissenters who look with interest, and even with something like sympathy, on the working of the machinery of Episcopacy, and who prophesy all sorts of advantage to the Episcopal form of government, and predict a further growth of that doctrine in the Church which they most admire, as results of disestablishment, cannot, if they would, be quite so rancorous against the Established Church as that older type of Dissenters would have been who held prelacy to be idolatry of a very bad kind, and who found nothing in either the art or doctrine of the Church with which they could sympathise. Political hostility to the endowment by the State of a system which is, however, partly admired and wished well to, can never be quite as fierce as political hostility to the enthronement of Jezebel and the triumph of Baal. Mr. Thomson himself proves our case, for in trying to stimulate the indignation of his people against the Established Church, he is compelled to remind them of those forms of doctrine in it to which they feel the most repulsion,—the "bogey of Romanism," which he said was already quite at home within the Establishment,—and to pass rapidly over the many more numerous forms of doctrine with which they agree. Surely Mr. Thomson must know per- fectly well that disestablishment, so fax from exorcising the "bogey" of Anglican Romanism, will only transform it into an independent sect from what it now is,—namely, a somewhat insignificant element, consciously rather ill at ease, in a Church in which it has much to do to justify its toleration. We never suggested that Dissenters in general would be so "frail" as to be seduced into the Establishment. But we did say, what no one can deny, that the zeal of their polemic against the Establishment is sadly cooled as they begin to realise, what they are now beginning to realise, that the free intellectual atmosphere of the National Church is very fascinating, its art very noble, its form of government far from despicable, and its recent history full of hints which Dissenters themselves do well to lay to heart.
Mr. Thomson tells us that we gave him and his fellow- worshippers credit "for so much advancement in those enlarged principles and sympathies which are expressed by the word ' culture,' that there is good hope of their being reconciled at last to the things they had most strenuously opposed, of their setting aside their Nonconformity for a polite alliance with the- world, and exchanging the rough garment and stern tones of the prophet of the desert for the soft clothing and softer speech of those who are in king's houses." But that is a flight of Mr. Thomson's imagination. To tell the truth, though we admire many Nonconformists, we do not see more in them than in the Clergy of the Established Church to remind us of "the prophet of the desert." There are probably more austere recluses in the Church than among the Dissenters,—which is a fact not perhaps to the disadvantage of Dissenters. The excellent and eloquent men who rise to distinction among the Voluntary sects certainly do not, as a rule, wear the soft clothing of kings' houses ; but neither do they indulge in leathern girdles, and the hermit's fare of locusts and wild honey. They eat the fine white bread, and partake of the well-roasted joints of the middle-classes,—and from the middle-classes, too, comes the ring of their not too prophetic speech. We are aware- that this is no more a disparagement to them than to the great majority of the national clergy. Still, it is well not to be misled by the poetry of Congregationalism into thinking that John the Baptist resembled Dr. Parker at all more than the- Dean of Westminster, or that the conditions of life in the wilderness in which he preached repentance to the Pharisees, approached at all nearer to those of life at the Holborn Viaduct than to those of life in Westminster Abbey. Indeed, to our thinking, John the Baptist would have been even less likely to feel profound admiration for Mr. Beecher, than to preach acceptably before the Queen. We admit that there are inconveniences in living on voluntary subscriptions which do not belong in the same degree to living on en- dowments, but they are not of a kind to ensure to those who endure them the " rough garments and stern tones of the prophet of the wilderness ;" and they are not in any degree inconsistent with " a polite alliance with the
world." If there be anything really like John the Baptist in the function of a Congregationalist minister, we suppose it must be in the rather slight analogy between that of the preacher to whose influence it was due that " the kingdom of heaven suffered violence," and " the violent took it by force," and that of the ministers to whom it may one day be due that the Establishment will be violently stormed, and the Esta- blished Church disestablished and disendowed ; but even so the analogy is remote, for the violence which comes of profound religious emotion, and the violence which comes of even sincere political indignation, are not quite homogeneous.
Mr. Thomson is rather fertile in difficult paradoxes. He thinks the Congregationalists are far too much attached to true Com- prehension to tolerate the "comprehension of the State," and he seemed to hold that both thought and sympathy are far more active in the various Voluntary Churches of the people than in the great Established Church of the nation. What kind of comprehension that is that protests vehemently against the comprehension of the State, we are not quite sure. As far as we can see, the ecclesiastical comprehension which is not chiefly of the State's making has at present very little existence. What do the Wesleyans know of the religious life of the Inde- pendents? what do the Quakers know of the Wesleyans? what the Unitarians of the Quakers? what the Swedenborgians of the Unitarians? Are not all these bodies so strictly shut out from any share in each other's religious life, that the state of things could hardly be worse than it is, and would certainly be better if all of them were ever to be included in the same ecclesiastical organisa- tion ? Surely the High Church hear much more of the difficulties of the Broad Church, and the Evangelicals of the crotchets of the High Church, within the Establishment, than sects approxi- mately in the same relation would hear of each other any- where else. What do the various voluntary ecclesiastical bodies in the United States know of each others' proceedings ? Not a tenth part as much as the various sections of the English Church know of each others' proceedings, and for a very good reason. Voluntary sects must always be more or less com- petitors and rivals for popular favour, and such competitors are not very much in the habit of taking counsel together. On the other hand, different schools in the same Church are almost forced to come to some kind of mutual understanding with each other,—and nothing illustrates this necessity better than the remarkable discussions we often hear between the Evangelical and the High-Church party as to the progress, for instance, of their various missions, and the comparative value of the usual evangelical and the usual sacerdotal resources, for stimulating these missions. When did any one hear of such conferences between ritualistic and evangelical free Churches, not bound together by any external tie ?
In spite of that somewhat ambitious idealism of Mr. Thomson's which ventured to pose Nonconformists as the stern-voiced, roughly-clad prophets of the desert, in contrast with what he considers,—we fear very mistakenly—to be the richly-clothed and soft-spoken clergy of the National Church, we fully recognise in his speech the earnest desire to help the cause of truth, and the profound conviction that the abolition of what he calls the "huge anachronism" of the Establishment, would help that cause. He believes that it would result in the resurrection, " not of the Church of the priests, but of the Church of the people," and implies, we suppose, by that remark, a hope that sacerdotal doctrines will die out from pure inanition, when they come to depend on popular support for the sinews of war. Now that the revenues of an Establishment do lend a certain artificial importance to such schools of doctrine as the Ritualistic,—which would evince but slender vitality in England without them,—we quite agree. But whether the absolute dependence of a Church on temporary popular sympathy is really a favour- able condition for the search after truth, we think a good many even of Mr. Thomson's own allies would be found to doubt. Whatever may be urged to the contrary, adaptation to produce a popular impression is not a final or adequate test of any kind of truth, religious or otherwise,—and this is the test which pure Voluntaryism is always inclined to apply to the problem of religious truth. For our own parts, we do not believe that any ecclesiastical constitution would be so favour- able at once to personal earnestness and to thoughtful respect for the convictions of others, as a very wide national Church, —a Church with formulae much simpler and fewer than those of the Thirty-nine Articles,—confessedly comprehending a large number of different shades of theological belief, all being on a perfect equality within the same communion. There seems to us nothing at all in the condition of the Voluntary Churches of America, and nothing in the condition of the Voluntary Churches of our Colonies, to make the prospect of pure Voluntaryism anywhere a fascinating one. The English Dissenting Churches themselves lead more vigorous and more thoughtful lives in consequence of those discussions which take place within the National Church, which they so eagerly watch, discussions which, as far as we can see, would disappear alto- gether, if ever Voluntaryism triumphs and substitutes a swarm of sects for a comprehensive Church. Dissent in England is all the greater and the abler for the jealous eye it keeps on the Church of the nation ; and we feel little doubt that it would very soon fall into cultivating the comparatively provincial and ad captandum popularity of Voluntary sects in other countries, but for the keen and wholesome criticism devoted by it to that Church which it so earnestly desires to disestablish and disen- dow, and to which it would pay hardly any further attention when once that result had been achieved. If Mr. Thomson and his colleagues are not even now precisely like those romantically grand and stern prophets of the desert whom he depicts, they would be even less like them, and even more disposed, we fear, than some of them are even at present, to apologise for the maudlin gallantries of Mr. Beecher, if they had not a National Church to study, to criticise, and to attack.
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