BOOKS.
MR. BALDWIN BROWN ON THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY.%
THESE essays are full of power of a very broad and refined kind. They seem to us, indeed, to lose not a little of their force when they approach the practical solution of spiritual problems, for while Mr. Baldwin Brown's mind is one which draws its spiritual assumptions from a very wide range of moral and intellectual experience, which he classifies with great truth and delicacy of moral discrimination, it seems to be also one of those so com- mon in our own time, which is rather puzzled and daunted for practical purposes by the deep significance of the facts with which it has to deal, and which finds the greatest difficulty in condensing the results of its survey into any series of sober practical inferences at all commensurate with the range of its investigation. Mr. Brown takes hold of so many and so fine clues of moral reason while he is discussing the spiritual basis of all ecclesiastical concep- tions, that when he comes to weave them together into a practical bond for a religious society he is overwhelmed with the complexity of his own data, and seems to us to feel compelled to drop somewhat arbitrarily many of them, and to plait the others together somewhat perfunctorily. Still the value of the book is leas in its conclusions, even for those who agree in them, than in the beauty and power and catholicity of the spirit with which Mr. Baldwin Brown surveys the origin of ecclesiastical institutions, and traces the causes of their de- gradation and renovation. How far he succeeds in justifying the principle of the Independent body which makes the individual Con- gregation the unit of ecclesiastical life, even our author himself, who without any mock-modesty is far from overweening self-confi- dence, must probably think very doubtful. But he will, at least, do • First Principles of Ecclesiastical Truth. Essays on the Church and Society. By J. Baldwin Brown, B.A. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
a great deal not only for those who agree with him, but for those who differ with him in practical conclusions, towards realizing the vast and increasing intricacy and breadth and, to some extent, the increasing vagueness and indeterminateness, of the spiritual wants in which all ecclesiastical life originates,—towards con- vincing every one who reads these lectures how closely all the secular and ecclesiastical tendencies of our day are interwoven with each other,—and towards convincing the most bigoted of sectarians that the evil spirit which injures and degrades spiritual life, though it
may be more openly recognized and adopted by one ecclesiastical organization than by another, is always threatening all ecclesiasti- cal organizations, and may, at any given time, be gaining a greater victory in the Church which seems to our author the
purest in its original principle than even in that which seems to him the most degenerate.
Mr. Baldwin Brown opens his book with a very striking and powerful delineation of that yearning of man for an infallible guide which is at once the beginning of the seeking after God in the heart, and the occasion for all assertions of ecclesiastical authority by Churches. He sketches the difficulty, and com- plexity, and indeterminateness of the most urgent moral problems almost with the force and profound melancholy breathed through Mr. Clough's wonderful little poem called, " Through a Glass Darkly ;" asks in something not very wide of Mr. Clough's language,—
"Rules baffle instincts, instincts rules, Wise men are bad and good are fools ; Facts evil, wishes vain appear ; We cannot go, why are we here ?"
—and shows that the fine and urgent and insatiable conscience which puts such questions, forces us to believe in an Infallible Guide, and tempts us to believe in the possibility of obtaining an infallible knowledge of what it is that that Infallible Guide in-
tends. In the one belief Mr. Brown earnestly concurs ; the other he believes to be the root of all unspiritual evasions of our spiritual education. The Infallible Guide does not intend, or wish, to give us any infallible clue to his purposes, for that would put an end to the ceaseless effort, the anxious groping, the careful discrimination, in a word, the perpetual tentative dis- cipline, by which we learn to become truly spiritual beings. All he gives us to help us on our way is a firm trust that all our mis- takes are watched by this Infallible Guide, and all transmuted into the discipline by which we acquire a finer discrimination and a truer sympathy with himself. Every ecclesiastical offer of a really infallible clue to the drift of the divine guidance,—whether it be based on the authority of a priesthood or the authority of a book,— is really an offer of false security tending to bid us lean on some imperfect human substitute for God,—of which imperfect human substitute for God we may be sure that the more it is confounded with God, the less knowledge of God it tends to give us. This is the general drift of Mr. Baldwin Brown's fine lectures on the Roman doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility and the Protestant doctrine of Biblical infallibility,—in the former of which, however, he appears to us, while striving and intending to be absolutely just to Rome, to be rather more misled by biassed authorities and untrustworthy controversialists, than in the latter. In the general purport and drift of these lectures, however, we not only heartily concur, but find a great deal that is put with freshness and originality (in the only good sense of that term as applied to such subjects), as well as force.
In the remainder of the lectures devoted to ecclesiastical principles, in which Mr. Baldwin Brown tries to lead up to his own theory of the relation of Church and State, of course we do not think him so successful, though he never omits to do full justice to the views of his opponents. First, we have a lecture on the " Natural History of Anti-Christ," by which Mr. Brown means no investigation of unintelligible types and obscure metaphors, but the natural history of the principle most opposed to the reign of Christ in the heart and life of man. Mr. Brown holds with St. Paul that this reign of Christ must be traced back through the whole history of Israel, " who did all eat of the same
spiritual meat, and drink the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ." And as the reign of Christ, however dimly revealed to the people of Israel, goes back to their earliest separation as a dis- tinct people for a distinct purpose from the nations around them,
so the spiritual ambition most opposed to Christ's power can be traced to the same early ages. This principle our author regards as the desire of man for independence of the divine will, for self- sufficiency, for a mock-divine universality of empire. The earliest trace of this Mr. Brown finds,—on rather slender evidence surely,—
in the tradition with relation to the Tower of Babel, and he holds that the confusion thrown upon this first attempt at a universal human empire taking no account of the will of God, was the barrier of language, which became a final obstacle in the way of the consolidation of a homogeneous and mighty State of anything like universal dominion.. The second attempt at anything of the same kind he regards as to be found in the growth of the great Assyrian monarchy, whose kings openly claimed (as Nebuchadnezzar is said to have done) divine honours, and affected to dispense all their subjects from all religious obligations not sanctioned by themselves. The Jewish State, whose king was a mere servant of God, was the moral protest against Assyrian despotism, and while the Jews were true to their faith, they were protected against Assyria ; when false, they were allowed to be vanquished by Assyria, in order that they might learn what the true development of that infidelity really ended in. Finally, the last and greatest attempt at a universal dominion which embodies this proud assumption of something like a mock-divine form, is that of Rome,—imperial and ecclesiastical, especially the latter, which Mr. Brown considers to have culminated in the claim of doctrinal infallibility for the Pope,—heartily admit- ting, however, that individual Popes have constantly been good and great men, though they have been the keystones of an edifice of an intrinsically evil drift, one which, like the old Tower of Babel, has for its object to arrogate to man the attributes of God. (We may remark, by the way, that Mr. Brown certainly misunderstands the sense in which the Romanists maintain the infallibility of the Pope when he speaks of their doctrine as having led to the "worship of a blind and obstinate old man," for they do not, as far as we know, ascribe any greater justness or wisdom to the Pope's mind (subjectively) than they do to that of any other private individual of equal capacity and worth ; they only regard him as the special hand or index provided to point the Church to doctrinal truth, just as the hand of the watch points to the hour of the day,—without consciousness and with- out merit. It may be that the Pope is preserved from official error only by a paralytic stroke, or by a subjective error of his own of the gravest kind,—his ignorance, for in- stance, of the real meaning of words ; he is, in the Catholic theory, as we understand it, as mere an instrument, and it may be as blind an instrument of Providence for perfecting the machinery of theological teaching, as Caiaphas was, when he said that it was meet that Christ should die for the nation.) However, in selecting the principle of self-sufficiency, and the refusal to rest on the guidance of a higher and diviner hand, as the essence of the power most opposed to Christ's, few will quarrel with Mr. Baldwin Brown, though they may find it, as we do, very difficult to under- stand how Mr. Brown manages to connect this self-sufficiency with the principle of an established Church,—the principle, that is, that the nation should select some form of faith sufficiently wide to be a fair expression of its conscience, and assist all those who hold that form of faith to teach it wherever there is real religious destitution not otherwise provided for.
Mr. Baldwin Brown's point seems to be that the State by admitting officially the existence of an external religious teaching which it is bound to aid, desecrates the secular life of the nation in which all that religious life should be rooted, and from which it should proceed. He finds something of arrogance, of the mock-divinity of the hierarchical system, of the claim, as it were, to dispose of God and to limit the resources of the divine ruler, in this patronage of any religion by the State. He says very profoundly (p. 172), " The effort to work out the oneness of the Church and the State into a clear form, has been the great struggle of the inner life of every State in Christendom ; and out of the apparent difference between the two, the divergence of their boundary line, the deepest sorrows of Christian society spring. It is but the sorrow of the individual Christian life magnified to the national scale. The same sad contrast between the ideal and the actual confronts us every- where." And he evidently thinks that the recognition by the State of any special Church is something like that classification of life into secular and sacred days, which has a tendency to make the former sinful through the false stress it lays on the sanctity of the latter. He thinks that religion is as much too sacred for an attempt at embodiment in statutes as " the domestic sympathies and affections and the free play of the higher intellectual life of the community." But is it not the fact that " the domestic sympathies and affections and the free play of the higher in- tellectual life" are formally recognized and ostensibly promoted in our laws? What, for instance, is the judge's power to vary punishment in proportion to degrees of guilt and respon- sibility but a recognition of the higher distinctions of the moral life? What is the enactment that young criminals may, instead of purely penal measures, be sent to a " reformatory school," but the fullest recognition by the State of the necessity and duty of bringing higher domestic sympathies and affections and a freer play of the higher intellectual life to bear upon them ? What is the law which refuses to pronounce a divorce if guilt can be proved on both aides, but a recognition of the binding character of the higher domestic motives ? It seems to us simply impossible to attempt any wise legislation at all which does not fully recognize the moral law, the domestic sympathies, the higher affections, and the truest intellectual life. Why, then, should we grudge the State a recognition of religious teaching? Is the State to teach deserted and helpless children arithmetic, and not teach them morality? or teach them arithmetic and morality, but not reverence and love to God ? or to teach helpless children arithmetic and morality and reverence and love to God, but not to teach, if it can, equally helpless and more miserable men ? It seems to us that the practical problem is one of so much difficulty simply on account of the practical limita- tions imposed by the chaos of our spiritual life. We do not hesitate to embody in legislation any principle on which we are all tolerably well agreed. The State recognizes physical science and sanatory science, and directly encourages the very highest play of the intellect of men in both, because we have a tolerably distinct agreement in relation to them. It recognizes and distinctly enforces the moral claims of children on their parents and other moral claims of man on man, because we are tolerably well agreed as to these also. Why should it hesitate to recognize and distinctly encourage the right of the poor, the miserable, and the evil, to opportunities of religious instruction if we are sufficiently agreed upon what is right there also ? In fact, there are very many dissentients as to a great many of the moral principles recognized by the State, of whom, however, we take little account. Some legal reformers regarding all crime as mere unfortunate circumstance, to be guarded against by circum- stance of a contrary tendency, would have had light crimes, to which men are more prone, more heavily punished than the heavier crimes to which they are less prone, in order to make up the differ- ence in temptation by a corresponding difference in determent. Why do we reject that heresy? Because it offends the conscience of the vast majority. So, again, though we are very little agreed as to what religion should be taught, we are on the whole very tolerably well agreed that some religion, and that of a Christ- ian type, is better than none, and accordingly it would be a greater offence against the conscience of the community to provide no organization for setting forth their religions duties to the ignorant and degraded, than to provide some organization of a wide and elastic ecclesiastical type. Nor can we see even in Mr. Baldwin Brown's own principles where the radical vice of this conception lies. As far as we understand him, even the payment by the State of religious chaplains to our prisons would have to be put an end to as part of the evil system of the " patronage" of religion.
We have even now only noticed a part of this able, thoughtful, and most sincere book, and have no space left to review the lectures on the intellectual, social, ecclesiastical, and theological revolutions in the last quarter of a century, which are full of interest of their own, and in a field closely related to that of the first part of the book, though not in strict continuity with it. We can only recommend our readers not to stop where we have stopped. Mr. Baldwin Brown is so clear-minded, so honest, so courageous, and so completely Christian, that while he never suppresses a difficulty in the way of faith that is really visible to him, he never fails to show the depth of conviction with which he holds that if the difficulty be not surmountable, there must be some way of viewing it in which it is no longer a difficulty, but a new development of the truth.
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