Church lib
Edward Norman
Disestablishment and Liberation William H. Mackintosh (Epworth Press £6.50) The adjustment of the relations of Church and State in the nineteenth century had a significance which historians are unlikely to underemphasise. By an accumulating series of piecemeal reforms Parliament was induced to knock away most of the legal safeguards of the Established Church, and, in practice, a neutral, liberal state was assembled. Public men were conscious of the huge change implied; men who were otherwise characterised by an aversion to theorising about politics were excessively articulate in the defence of the concept of the confessional state — or in attacking it. Most of those who sought these changes were in fact Christians: their antipathy to the idea of religious establishment had its origin in opposition to the legal privileges of the Church of England — but the Nonconformists progressively fell upon all kinds of theoretical objection to state protection and endowment of religion in any guise. As Edward Miall, the Dissenters' leading propagandist, remarked in 1845, of those who supported state churches, "Have they never caught a glimpse of the loathsome things that live, and crawl, and gender there?" To some, it has seemed that the nineteenth-century dispute between Church and Chapel was a sort of eccentric bourgeois luxury, but since the real question at issue concerned the very nature of the state, its moral basis and its moral competence, it was an issue of the greatest moment..
Any study of the means by whic0 those changes were engineered is therefore to be welcomed. Dr Mackintosh has written a full account of the activities of the Liberation Society — a national agency of militant religious dissent which, in alliance with political radicalism, did so much to propagate the ideal of disestablishment in the middle decades of the last century. It was this body which gathered nearly all the brands of Protestant (and Irish Catholic) nonconformity into the fold defined by the 'voluntary principle.' Those churches, they supposed, were most agreeable to God's Word which paid up for their own ministers and chapels; and those were most corrupt and degraded which dipped into the public purse — like the Church of England, with its enjoyment of the national religious endowments. But the trouble with the 'voluntary principle was that it did not really work beneficially, and by the end of the century it had so failed to provide for the financial needs of the Liberation Society itself that the colossal enterprise sank into decline.
Dr Mackintosh's book is the first study of the history of the Liberation Society. It is a work of great historical utility — the first serious attempt to analyse the operations of an important nineteenth century religious agency since Bernard Manning's Protestant Dissenting Deputies was written thirty years ago. Dr Mackintosh has gone through all the records of the society with patience and accuracy, and presents his material with clarity and balance.
It would have been agreeable to have been able to leave consideration of this work at that point. But unfortunately for Dr Mackintosh, his labours have been so misconstrued by his own publicists that a great deal more has to be said, in order to give a fair assessment to those who might invest £6.50 in Disestablishment and Liberation. The public were first made aware of Dr Mackintosh's work a few months ago when BBC radio gave it an advance advertisement. An "important book," we were then informed, was to be Published in the autumn which would deal With the whole issue of disestablishment in England. Its author then displaced five Minutes with some reflections on the need for the disestablishment of the Church of England — though he is himself an American Presbyterian. Now that it has arrived, the book-jacket continues to encourage the supposition that the contents have recognisable relevance, thus Perpetuating, if only momentarily, the impression created by the BBC. "There are many parallels with social-political movements seeking wider recognition in our own time," runs the blurb. In a foreword Dr Payne adds, "There is therefore present relevance as well as historical value in what is recorded in the following Pages," And in his own preface, Dr Mackintosh sustains the claim that something touching contemporary discussion is to follow — "I shall leave my readers to judge how far the Church of England, and the Church of Scotland, is meeting the test, and which Church is best qualified to remain as it is at present established." There then follow some speculations about Church unity schemes, a. Prediction that the laity will overflow the influence of the clergy (because the latter "mark titne with their endless talking"), and the conclusion that "Clearly, if a modern Church is adequately to fulfil its role in modern society, the policy of Mutual dependence of church and state Must go." But why? We turn to the book to read the evidence for these extraordinary assertions, and we find that we turn in vain. For it is a straightforward Oxford DPhil thesis, based on a close study of the minute-books of the Liberation Society — and, as far as it is Possible to judge, on almost no other sources. Like all recent history, of course, these pages do contain information about things which have a contemporary relevance, but no attempt whatsoever is Made in this book, outside the top-dressing in the foreword and preface, to point out what they are. The reader's conscience, stimulated in Pavlovian fashion into those secretions of moral solemnity which leak out of most contemporary considerations of 'the Church's role in society,' can relax.
The fact is, Dr Mackintosh has never really decided whether he is writing a 'Ouse history of the Liberation Society — _which is all that his sources will in fact bear — or whether he is writing an account of 'The Movement for the Separation of the Anglican Church from State Control' as the sub-title declares. If it is really meant to be the latter, then the book fails at every point. Because he is still personally involved in the issues he discusses — which was indicated in the BBC interview, and by a bold statement in the preface that there is " an account for subscribers and supporters [of a new Liberation Society] at the Royal Bank of Scotland, Knightsbridge, London SW3 " — and because his knowledge is derived from the records of a single propagandist body, he seems unable to detach his own judgement from the polemicism of the nineteenth-century Nonconformists. He just does not seem to see that for all their talk about freedom and the rights of conscience they were incredibly vulgar and infinitely limited in vision. Yet Dr Mackintosh has written a much better book than he or his publishers realise. It is not, that is to say, about the fashionable things they claim it is.
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