THE GENIUS OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH.•
Mn. FAWKES, whose Studies in Modernism are familiar to many outside the ranks of professed students of theology, has now written
a small book on an even more attractive subject, the genius of the English Church, and we hope it may secure a very wide circle of readers. The writer addresses his book to the average layman ; and if it helps that vaguely defined but very real personage to take a greater and better-informed interest in the Church of his fathers, and to place a greater confidence in his own judgment of what the National Church ought to be, it will have performed the function its author designed for it.
Mr. Fawkes sketches rapidly the various movements from the Reformation to the Catholic Revival through which the English Church has passed, and which have helped to make it what it is ; saying a kind word for the despised eighteenth century and the age of reason, which gave us both Butler's sermons and Johnson's " vigorous piety " ; and suggesting that both the Evangelical and Tractarian movements, which seem to have spent their force, have " deflected the Church from the line of advance marked out by her genius and history " ; because reason, though it is not religion, is an element in religion, and a specially characteristic element in English religion. Incidentally Mr. Fawkes gives us shrewd judgments on some of the chief actors in these various movements, both ancient and modern—Henry VIII. and Bancroft, the Latitudinarians, Newman and Manning, Archbishop Tait— but he is more concerned with the principles involved in the move- ments, and with their bearing on present conditions. Especially important at this juncture is the chapter on the relations of Church and State. Here Mr. Fawkes shows himself a disciple of Hooker and 'Burke ; and so, we imagine, is the average layman, if he only knew it, for he also regards the English Church as consisting of all Christian Englishmen. But this idea has long been the scorn of clerical newspapers. It is now generally assumed that such a view, however tolerable in the days of Hooker and Burke, has become impossible since the removal of religious disabilities and the opening of Parliament to all unbelievers. Mr. Fawkes makes short work of this objection :-
" If the Protestantism of the country is not affected by the repeal of the penal laws against Roman Catholics, its Christianity is even less so by the admission of a handful of Jews and secularists to citizenship. The greater absorbs the less. As a fact, since the removal of these disabilities, Parliament has given us legislation in advance of the public opinion Of the Churches ; philanthropy— which, after all, has something to do with religion—has reached a higher level without than within the fold. While, theologically, in spite of subscription, there are greater divergences of opinion
• The Genius of the English Church. By Alfred Fawkes. London: J. Murray. 12a. 8d. net.1
between Churchmen and Churchmen than between Churchmen and Christians of other communions."
Consequently, as will be guessed, Mr. Fawkes is not attracted by the recent cry for autonomy, and he believes that the Church as a whole is not attracted by it ; but the average layman is not conspicuous for zeal and energy, and is too much inclined to let the clericalist have his own way. Moreover, he and his brethren are not organized for defence as the other side is for attack. Mr. Fawkes puts the danger as a " shifting of the centre of gravity from the Crown and Parliament to certain clerical or mixed assemblies acting on de- nominational principles and influenced by denominational ideas." And he quotes the opinion of Bishop Thirlwall that the so-called liberty which we are urged to demand, even at the price of Dia- establishment, would be a grinding tyranny, and the worst calamity that could befall the Church." Scattered through the book are many wise judgments on questions of present controversy, which we must leave the layman to discover for himself. But we may quote one saying which has been illustrated in very recent Church history. " The freedom of the Church, as our irreconcilables understand it, is freedom to exclude opponents. They are not satisfied to regard the Church of England as a Reformed Church whose formularies were designedly framed in such a way as to include Catholics ' ; for them she is a Catholic Church whose formularies were designedly framed in such a way as to exclude Protestants."
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