THE DEAN OF ARCHES ON "JENKLNS v. COOK."
THE Church of England is a little unfortunate just now. Not a few of its clergy have been showing zeal untempered by discretion. One, at least, of its bishops has been exhibiting that overpowering passion for being "all things to all men" which is so very apt to fascinate weak heads with a dream of statesmanship, and to result only in a tangle of discrediting intrigues. Again, one of its laymen has connected the cause of religious feeling and religious freedom with silly and uncritical vagaries in relation to Scripture which do not add to the moral dignity of the very just claim he had made. And its chief ecclesiastical Judge has delivered himself of what, by his own account, is a superfluous judgment on the dogmatic obligations of the communicant laity,—a judgment the tendency of which is to lay fresh bur- dens upon their intellects and consciences at a moment when fresh burdens are particularly dangerous, and, moreover, to strengthen the impression already perilously diffused through the land, that the Judge of the Court of Arches is apt to lay down an exclusively clerical view of ecclesiastical law which the Judges of the Judicial Committee are pretty certain to revise and reverse on behalf of the laity of the realm.
These are not very promising auguries for a Church so much called in question from outside as the Established Church of the nation. But it is impossible to read the account of the recent suit in the Court of Arches promoted by Mr. Henry Jenkins against the Rev. Flavel Cook, without being inclined to find fault in turns with clergy, bishop, layman, and judge. The clergyman whose action has caused the suit would have been far wiser if he had refused to import a new dogmatic stringency into a spiritual rite which can never properly be regarded as resting so much on any intellectual basis as on a basis of pious yearning and pro- found personal and historical sentiment. The layman who was refused admission to the Communion undoubtedly took up a position in relation to Scripture which is historically unintelligible and even puerile. The Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol carried into a region where trimming is particularly offensive, a policy of trimming which brought down upon him the significant, though reticent, censure of the Judge. And the Judge went out of his way to lay down a principle which will frighten a great many laymen away from the Communion Service, a principle, moreover, which is open to this essential and fatal fault,—that it assumes "God's Word" to be necessarily synonymous with the written Bible, and as far as we can see, allows it to bear no other meaning. The Church of the nation can scarcely congratulate herself on any of these events.
If the Dean of Arches had confined himself to giving judgment on the question whether or not the Rev. Flavel Cook was liable to a criminal prosecution under the ecclesiastical law for refusing the Communion to Mr. Henry Jenkins, it is probable enough that his judgment would have been sustained without entailing any very serious results of any kind on the Church of England. If we understand this part of the case aright, the Rev. navel Cook was not liable to a criminal penalty under the ecclesiastical law for what he did, supposing that he had a fair presumption for his own view of duty, that he submitted his course in the proper way to his Bishop, and that he received his Bishop's sanction for that course. Even though Mr. Cook's view of the ecclesiastical law had been mistaken and contrary to that taken by the highest Ecclesiastical Courts, still the particular suit promoted against him by Mr. Jenkins depended on Mr. Jenkins being able to show not only that that view was erroneous, but that either Mr. Cook had no prinui-facie case for what he did, or that in relation to that primii-facie case, he had not properly submitted his procedure to his Bishop, and obeyed that Bishop's injunction in the matter. This seems reasonable enough ; and unquestionably the evidence of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, given on the trial, seems to show that Dr. Ellicott did give his sanction to the course taken by Mr. Cook, even though he was so anxious to forget that he had been rash enough to give it, as perhaps even to succeed in that forgetfulness. He wrote a letter for Mr. Cook to send to Mr. Jenkins,—not, he now says, as representing his own view of the case, but only as helping Mx. Cook better to express his view of it,—and then he wrote to Dlr. Cook to beg that this generous effort at episcopal exegesis of a perturbed clergyman's state of mind, might be kept a secret from the world. In fact, the Bishop, to use his own words, wished to be thought "the friend and well-wisher of both parties,"—which, when the parties are parties to a criminal pro- secution, one being prosecutor and the other the defendant, is a very difficult position to hold. Certainly all that he suc- ceeded in doing was in convincing the public that he wished both to run with the hare and to hunt with the hounds. He tried to divest himself of his responsibility for the course which he had sanctioned on the part of Mr. Cook, without taking up any responsibility for the course of Mr. Jenkins ; yet it clearly was not a case in which a neutral position was possible. If the Bishop did not approve the course taken by Mr. Cook, he was bound to disapprove it, and not to give a quasi-approval in pencil, and revoke, or at least suppress it, in pen-and-ink. On this part of the case, we fear the reticent sarcasm of the Judge was amply earned. Dr. Ellicott desired to appear the "friend of both parties," but was actually the friend of neither, since to Mr. Jenkins he seemed what he was not, opposed to Mr. Cook ; and to Mr. Cook he seemed, what he was not, opposed to Mr. Jen- kins. Then, as to the lay element in the case, nothing can be less intelligible than Mr. Jenkins's position in declaring in the letter of July 20, 1874, that a great number of passages in the Bible are, "in their generally received sense, quite incompatible
with religion or decency," and yet asserting that he believed all the time in the inspiration of the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, without giving the least hint of the mode in which he reconciled the apparent discrepancy of the two state- ments. To omit ad libitum all that does not suit your taste in Scrip- ture on the ground that "in its- generally received sense it is in- consistent with religion and decency," without a hint as to that other sense not generally received, in which it is consistent with religion and decency, is an eccentricity which connot add weight to the position assumed by the man who commits it,—so that even Mr. Jenkins appears to us to have failed to vindicate adequately that reasonable freedom of the religious laity in relation to dogma, for which he so justly contended.
But what we regret most in the whole matter remains. It seems to us clear that Sir Robert Phillimore has devoted his great abilities to devising apologies for putting on the conscience of communicants dogmatic fetters which will lead to very startling and injurious results. In the first place, as we have remarked already, the whole of his judgment turns upon the interpretation which he assigns to "God's Word," as if it could mean nothing but the Bible,—a feeble and even childish assumption. The latter part of the judgment rests on the passage in the Com- munion Service where any "hinderer and slanderer of God's Word" is warned from applying for the sacrament. And the Judge argues most elaborately, first, that Mr. Jenkins, in speaking of a great number of passages of Scripture as, in their generally received sense, quite inconsistent with religion and decency, was a hinderer and slanderer of Scripture, and therefore of God's Word ; and next,
that in denying the doctrine of eternal punishments and the per- sonality of the devil, he denied clearly asserted doctrines of Scrip- ture, which again implied a hindering and slandering of God's Word. Nay, all those who do this are to be understood as in- cludectin the term "evil livers." Now of course we are not able to dispute Sir R. Phillimore's law. That is a matter for the Court of Appeal, not for the newspapers. But we do say this, that by a like argument it would be easy to maintain that almost any doctrine you please, which may be found in the Bible or Prayer-book, is obligatory on those of the laity who wish to be communicants, and that any priest in the Estab- lished Church would be justified in repelling laymen from the communion-table as " evil-livers " for expressing disbelief in such a doctrine. For instance, Sir R. Phillimore takes pains to quote from the 27th Canon the warning against administering the Communion, to those, inter alit's, who have been depravers "of anything contained in the book of the ordering of the priests and bishops,"—which means the ordinary Ordination and Consecration services. Now, no conviction is more widely spread amongst the laity than the conviction that the power of remitting sins implied in that " book " to priests, is an imaginary power, conferred by our Lord on his Apostles, but not intended to be transmitted by them to any order of men whatever. And clearly it follows from Sir Robert Phillimore's view that laymen bolding this opinion,—and no opinion is more widely held,—should be repelled from the communion-table as rigidly as Mr. Jenkins was repelled from it by the Rev. Flavel Cook. If Sir Robert Philli- more's ecclesiastical law is to hold at all, there will soon be hardly a lay communicant in the English Church whom a priest will not be justified in repelling from the communion-table on dogmatic grounds.
What strikes us as so disastrous in the judgment is chiefly this :—The Communion Service is a service of which it is the very essence that it expresses the feeling of personal devotion and attachment to our Lord, and that it strengthens and fosters that feeling by the gift of the grace which follows obedience to his injunction, and the desire to be united with his spirit. There is nothing dogmatic about the sacrament except whatever amount of dogma is necessarily implied in any profound personal act of re- verence and love to a divine being. If a layman is to be denied the strength and power which this act of communion gives, because he does not feel any confidence as to the personality of Satan,—a point on which it is quite possible for the most literal believers in Scripture to hold a good many different views,—or in the eternity of punishments inflicted on those who die unrepentant,—it comes to this, that because you don't believe in the devil, and in the unchangeableness of the misery which comes upon those who, whether they believe in the devil or not, act as if they had a certain amount of fellowship with devils,—you shall have no ecclesiastical help in your endeavours to draw closer your tie with God, and with him who came to destroy the works of the devil. It seems to us simply monstrous for any Church to insist that because a man does not agree with its leading divines as to the metaphysical nature of evil and the duration of the results of evil, he shall be refused the rite of communion with the divine life, and the strength and exaltation which spring from acknowledging allegiance to that life. You might as well propose to refuse the advantage and protection of the English law to an English citizen, simply on the ground that he disapproves capital punishment and desires to alleviate the condition of convicts. The right to participate in the most fer- vent of our devotional services is made, by this judgment of the Dean of Arches, to depend not on the earnest desire for the bless- ings which that service promises, but on absolute assent to a num- ber of difficult and doubtful doctrines not connected with that service, and on which nine-tenths of educated laymen have never made up their minds, and perhaps in this life never will make up their minds. If that is to be so, farewell to the practice of lay communion in the Church of England. An ordinary Eng- lish layman knows that spiritual evil is at least so far personal that it needs a very vigorous personal resistance to prevent its taking hold of his own will. That makes it very natural to him to use the Scripture language about evil, but how far that Scripture language may represent the facts of the invisi- ble world exactly, or only roughly, he does not know, and does not, perhaps, very much care. Again, an ordinary English lay- man knows that the consequences of sin persevered-in and un- repented ought to be, and in his experience are, very bitter misery, which cannot disappear till the sin itself disappears. Whether or not there is any obstacle to repentance except personal volition of an eyil kind, he does not know. Belief in the infinite goodness of God leads him to hope, and perhaps even strongly to maintain, that there can be no such external obstacle to repentance outside the volition of the sinner himself. But on that, in his ignorance, he will, as a rule, pronounce no decisive judgment. He believes punishment to last as long as sin, and to be eternal if sin is eternal, but not other- wise. Is not that a good enough faith to entitle a man to be admitted to an act of communion with one in whom he earnestly desires always to "dwell," and by whom he seeks to have his life ordered ? If not, it is hardly likely that ordinary laymen in the English Church will be able to produce a better dogmatic title to admission to communion; and the clergy will have to keep the noble and thrilling Communion Service to themselves.
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