MR. BERESFORD HOPE ON COLONIAL CHURCHES.
MR. BERESFORD HOPE is a gentleman of very impulsive temperament. He is always rushing out on one in a new character. He plays many parts, and always with a certain "fever o' the mad," and "some tricks of desperation." At one time he is the gloomy cynic, who mocks at maudlin humanity, and calls on the slaveholder to tighten the bonds of the negro and add yet another tail to the cat of the overseer. A few weeks later he is exhorting the stone-carvers to throw off the chains of the capitalists " Cerbel " and " and proclaim themselves the authors of their own works. And to-day he is the champion of voluntary churches and colonial bishops. It is to be observed that it is not so much Christianity which Mr. Hope is desirous to spread as that particular form of it which is established in England and Ireland, and that he would have us direct our efforts not so much to the conversion of the heathen as to providing Christians with a duo supply of Church dignitaries. It is in this sense that a special appeal is addressed to the pockets of Englishmen, and before replying to it we may well be allowed to pause a moment and consider how far the object proposed to us is really worth attainment. The term "missionary enterprise" has in fact become a mis- leading one. Originally the efforts of our great societies were directed to the conversion of idolaters, and doubtless every Church and every Christian must desire to extend the know- ledge of the common Redeemer to all mankind. Approaching the matter from a lower point of view, that community is not a healthy one which has no ambition ; the absence of growth implies decay ; and it is to be feared that those who plead spiritual destitution at home as an excuse for neglecting a plain Christian duty, are often either availing themselves of a convenient cover for their selfishness or are somewhat sceptical as to the benefits of Christianity. In a colonizing people this desire of self•extension naturally found its favourite field among the heathen nations with whom our emigrants were brought into contact ;- and in countries where wealth had not as yet had time to accumulate, and where a large part of the labouring population consisted of convicts, it quickly became apparent that the emigrants if left to themselves would soon be hardly less of heathen than the aborigines. The system which thus sprang up has long survived the infancy of the colonies, and the result has been a certain confusion between missionary enterprise and the support of the Church there. So far as the first object is concerned the duty is too plain to be denied, but we are not aware that there are any peculiar reasons at the present moment which call for extraordinary exertion. So far as the second object is concerned it is not so easy to see the special obligation. Mr. Hope's theory is that the colonists are people who left England mainly out of pure patriotism. They "h tve gone abroad to rough it for their own ultimate benefit" no doubt,. but "also for the immediate convenience of the over-popu- lated mother country." " Hodge and Styles," it seems, had to be " coaxed and persuaded" into going where their labour is worth double or treble what it is in this country, and where they can get constant employment. Mr. Hope is a very persuasive man, and what prodigies of coaxing he may have achieved it would not be easy . to esti- mate. But if this is to be taken as an account of the ordinary motives of emigrants there never was a falser picture. So far from being coaxed to go, em- ployers of labour were often opposed to the movement, be- cause they said the country was being drained of all the most enterprising and industrious labourers. These were they who went to " better " themselves, and they have succeeded. Whatever claims might have been preferred on behalf of the colonies in their earliest infancy, they are now on the whole richer communities than the English. There certainly is not such great wealth accumulated in the hands of individuals, but there are very few in them who cannot very well afford to pay their own clergyman. No doubt in countries where every shilling a man has can always be laid out to advantage, he will be very apt to be even stingy in providing for the ministers of religion. He will like above all things a cheap church. But he is not a pagan. He knows the duty of public worship, and there are plenty of men in the community sufficiently zealous to shame the lukewarm into the supply of a want the existence of which they do not venture openly to deny. What therefore as it seems to us members of the Church of England are now asked to do is not to spread Christianity but to support "Anglicanism," not, as Mr. Hope puts it, to save " souls whom we induced to emigrate for our own convenience," but to save episcopacy. But wb altogether deny that the colonies are " unable to supply and pay for their own religion," and we very much doubt their being un- willing to do so. Whether they are willing to pay for the privilege of being ruled spiritually by bishops and deans, whether they prefer an aristocratic to a democratic form of Church government, is quite another affair. Very likely they are rather indifferent to dignitaries, unless they can have them gratis, and the question then is whether it is worth while for Englishmen to bribe them into adopting the episcopal form of Church government. Of course if a man holds by the High Church theory, if he thinks that the episcopal form of government and the order of the priesthood are of divine institution, and clings to the patristic maxim " without a bishop no church," there is an end of the matter, and " Anglicanism " and Christianity are for the member of the Church of England convertible terms.
But a large section of the clergy and, as we believe, a great majority of the laity, think nothing of the sort. They . may be very clear that their own form of Christianity is best suited to their own country, and even that it is in the abstract about the best that Christendom can show, and yet they may not think it necessarily the best suited to every form of society or to every stage of civilization. The civilization of Europe is as a rule founded on conquest. Everywhere a small armed class subjugated the community, and society is there- fore feudal and aristocratic in form. Modern colonies are purely industrial in their origin, and there is therefore no element out of which an aristocracy can come. In a young community wealth is too much of an accident to give its pos- sessors any great superiority, and the men who make fortunes come home to enjoy them. Whether time may work an altera- tion, and as a class enjoying hereditary wealth springs up a natural aristocracy be developed, we need not here inquire ; but at present the colonies are democratic and have shown a marked preference for a democratic form of civil government.
It is not therefore very surprising if members of the Church there, while they adhere to Anglican doctrine and worship, are content to dispense with episcopacy unless they can have it at our expense. That is a course equally in harmony with their parsimony and their politics, and it is easy to see that a Church burdened with costly dignitaries may not be able to compete in such a community with the Protestant sects which have no such burden. If episcopacy was anything but an exotic in the colonies would it not have been legally estab- lished by the colonial legislatures? and this Mr. Hope himself does not expect. We do not quite understand.why English- men should tax themselves to keep up episcopacy there any more than to found an order of peers. If either is really suited to them it is worth paying for, and if they do not see what institutions are really best for them is it our most press- ing duty to pay them to open their eyes ?
There are also a great number of members of the Church of England who are attracted to her not by any strong predilec- tion for her form of government, but by the fact that she is an established church. They dread the tyranny of public opinion in the voluntary.churches. They do not desire to be responsible to the clergy, or even to the clergy and the elders, for their opinions on points admitted to be of secondary im- portance. The requisites of membership in the Church have been defined by the Articles, and formularies, which can neither be altered nor added to without the consent of the national Legislature, and a man is not liable to be expelled be- cause he cannot always swim with the stream and adopt every new dogma by which the priesthood may wish to fetter free thought. But this is the merit of an establishment, not of an episcopal church. And as the Queen when she granted constitutions to the colonies parted with her legislative power, and the Colonial Parliaments confessedly do not like establishments, this is a merit the Colonial Churches do not possess. Only recently at the Cape Dr. Gray and his clergy have repudiated the authority of the decisions of the Privy Council, and have arrogated to themselves the power of making or at least of declaring that heresy which never was heresy before, and a member, lay or clerical, who does not like it, has no other course open to him, it would seem, but to leave the Church. An " episcopal regimen" of this kind may well seem a very questionable benefit, and one may be allowed to doubt whether its support is entitled to take precedence of the many claims on our benevolence at home. Could any one, for instance, reasonably urge on Mr. Bur- roughes, the ex-M.P. for Norfolk, that the most pressing claim on his purse was the building up of colonial bishoprics, and if he thought so, could his cottagers be expected to see the matter in the same light ? The fact is that wherever an episcopal Protestant Church exists as a voluntary church it has been driven, in order to maintain itself, to travel towards Rome. The priesthood in order to enforce or even justify its claim to authority has been compelled to base that authority on a divine ordinance. It has been so in America, it has been so in Scotland. When once that claim is admitted, freedom of religious thought is in danger, and the priesthood within the limits of its away is apt to be as hostile to human progress as the Church of Rome itself. The bonds which an alliance with the State imposes on the priesthood are on the whole salutary bonds. If colonists are rather afraid of bishops who claim to exercise by a divine right all the episcopal powers of the bishops of the third century are they much to be blamed, and need Englishmen trouble themselves much to interfere in the
matter ? Mr. Hope and his High Church friends, who are all devotees of the Apostolic succession, of course have a straight road before them. But it is not to that class exclusively that Mr. Hope addresses himself, and his silence on that head is therefore intelligible and discreet. We, however, are disposed to doubt whether episcopacy is quite certainly the best form of government for a voluntary church, and to doubt still more whether it will ever be preferred to the synodical form of government by any but the wealthier classes of society. In this state of mind we do not quite see the obliga- tion to bribe the poor colonists to submit to an episcopate, and we think the rich ones may very well wait for it till they are willing to pay for it themselves. The duty of missionary enterprise among the heathen rests on an entirely different principle, and will not be advanced by spasmodic efforts. The difficulties it has to overcome are the same everywhere and at all times.
Previous page
