TOPICS OF THE DAY.
WELSH DISESTABLISHMENT.
IN dealing with the Home Rule Bill we ventured to make the suggestion that every Bill should have its real title as well as its " short " title. If that principle were applied to the Welsh Disestablishment Bill the real title would run : "A Bill to disestablish and disendow four dioceses of the Anglican Church in order that the Anglican Church in Wales should not have any apparent advantage either of status or revenue in competing with other religious denominations within the Principality." We are well aware that we shall be vigorously taken to task for giving this plain-spoken description of the Bill. We must therefore Justify the position which we have taken up as to the feeling which inspires the Bill. Let us Bay, to begin with, however, that though what we have given above is the inspiring motive of the present piece of legislation, we are well aware that there are plenty of men who desire Disestablishment, not only in Wales, but in England, on very different grounds. There are plenty of men who honestly believe that the establishment and endowment of any religious body is a grievous error, and bold that a positive and great injury is done to religion by its connexion with the State. We do not agree with the arguments of such upholders of the voluntary principle in religion, but we are quite sure that they are single-hearted and sincere and that their wish is to reform and improve, not to injure, the religious life of Wales. They are in the true sense "Liberationists," and long to free all forms of religion from any sort of secular or State control But though we can appreciate and honour, if we disagree with, such views, we must say frankly that they have nothing to do with the Government Bill. If they had been given expression, they would have produced an absolutely different measure. Let us take, first, the case of those who believe that en- dowment is per se bad for religion and turns those who should be nothing but ministers of the Gospel into servers of tables and mere perfunctory officials. It is clear that purists of this kind would produce not a Bill for confis- cating the endowments of one Church in Wales, but of all the Churches. Again, it would be not a partial but a complete disendowmont that would be aimed at. But it will perhaps be said that there are only a very minute number of people who believe that all endowment is bad for religious bodies. Themass of Nonconformists only object to State endowment, and think it perfectly right and proper that religious bodies should have revenues at their disposal. They do not desire that the teachers and ministers of religion should always be dependent upon the gifts of those who are ministered to and taught. But in that case why should the Welsh Church be clisend owed as well as disestablished ? The reasonable and the natural thing would be to out the Church adrift from State control, but to leave her in possession of all her funds, just as the Nonconformist bodies are left in posses- sion of theirs. The anti-Erastians, who think that the connexion of Church and State and its consequent control or semi-control by secular bodies like Parliament is corrupting to the spiritual side of the Church, would get all they want by Disestablishment. But the Government Bill is in truth much more of a disendowing than a &sesta:- bhshing enactment. The essential thing in the measure is the expropriation of Church property. But, perhaps, it will be said that the disendowers are thinking of the pious men and women who before the birth of Nonconformity gave or left money to the Church. Those persons, it is alleged, would be horrified to see the uses to which Church pro- perty is now being put because they were loyal children of the Church of Rome, and the present Welsh Church is not in communion with Rome. Therefore by taking away their gifts from the Church we are doing what those pious founders would have wished were they alive to-day. Surely the answer to this hypocritical plea is that we may be sure that the pious founders in question would be far more shocked to see their money devoted to secular than to Anglican uses. To sum up, the present Bill cannot be regarded as a Bill intended to help the best interests of the Church by saving it from secular control and leaving it as a free Church. If such were its object it would stop short at Disestablishment.
Let us turn next to what is called the plea of justice. We can understand a man saying that it is unjust that a Church which is the Church of a minority, though a very large minority., should possess all the ancient and public endowments 'devoted to spiritual uses in Wales. Un- doubtedly a claim might very well be made by the Baptists, Congregationalists, Wesleyams, Roman Catholics, and so forth, to share in the Welsh endowments ; and if such a plea for equal co-endowment were made we, at any rate, should not fight against it. But that plea is not made. Those who talk about justice do not ask for any Church endowments for themselves. On the contrary they refuse them. What they ask for, and what is asked for in the Bill, is not a share of the spiritualities, but that the endow- ments now administered by the Anglican Church should be taken away and devoted to secular uses. The plea, for justice becomes in truth either a plea for secularization pure and simple or else a plea for unhandicapped commercial competition. "We are rivals in the important business of saving souls, and it is very unfair that these ancient endowments should go to one only of the competitors. We do not, however, want any share of those endowments for ourselves. We merely claim that we have a right to prevent our rival being unduly favoured. Therefore we ask that she shall be stripped of eleven-twelfths of 'the revenues which she now possesses. Let her take her chance like the rest of us. The help which she gets from these old endowments is a help which we do not possess, and justice demands that ehe shall not be allowed so huge a start." That appears to us to be the argument when stripped of its rhetoric. The leaders of the Nonconformist Churches do not say, as we might expect them to say, that there can be no rivalry among Christian Churches ; instead they call aloud for "a fair field and no favour." Again, there is no assertion made that the Church is misusing her endowments and doing harm with them, or that the Church's money is urgently needed for public purposes which cannot be carried out in any other way, or, finally, that the Anglican Church in Wales is, like the man in the parable, putting money into a napkin instead of letting it increase and multiply. In these cir- cumstances we cannot see that we are unfair in declaring that the true title of the Bill is that which we have given. The attitude of the promoters of the present Bill is indeed very much like that of those who argue that all social dis- tinctions are unjust. They do not, they declare, want social distinctions for themselves, but they are determined that their neighbours shall not have them.
So much for the negative objection to the Bill, the objection that it is inspired, not by what we may term the sincere and spiritual arguments of the Liberationists, but by arguments which are in truth unworthy, or, at any rate, belong to the region of trade rivalry rather than of religion. The positive arguments not only against this Bill but against Disestablishment altogether are, in our opinion, overwhelming. We mean, then, to fight as long as we are able against what is to us the hideous policy of secularizing the State. Though we are indignant at the thought of any slur being placed upon the Voluntary Churches, and though we regard those Voluntary Churches as necessary parts of the spiritual life of the nation, we hold that it is most important that the nation should not fall into the habit of thinking that the sole function of the State is to look after our roads, or our drains, or our commerce, and that if it carries out those functions it need not trouble itself with such trivial matters as the spiritual needs of man's nature. We loathe the assumption that religion, and with it the moral welfare of the nation—for they can. never be separated—are matters of indifference. We need hardly say that we would do nothing to impose a particular religion, or a particular form of religion, upon any man's conscience ; nor again do we regret the great divisions of Christianity or those between English Churchmen and Nonconformists. We are convinced that in such diversity there is spiritual health and safety. We have no longing for reunion in the Churches, for such reunion might well bring spiritual sterility. But though we believe that there will be, and ought to be, diversity, we desire that to one of the Churches should be entrusted the duty of representing the nation on the spiritual side. That duty carries with it certain obligations which some people regard, though we do not, as spiritual disabilities. It prevents the Church in question being exclusive or dogmatic in doctrine or even in forms of worship. It also gives, and rightly gives, the whole nation rights in the National Church. Nonconformists may demand, and can, enforce their demand, to take part in the services of the Church, and can by Act of Parliament and by the appointment of bishops and other Church digni- taries control the action of the Church. That is part of the price which the Anglican Church pays for being the National Church. In our opinion she gains spiritual health from this fact ; but that, we admit, is a matter of Opinion. In any case the circumstance that she represents the spiritual side of the nation cannot be a, matter of grievance to the Free Churches, for they glory in the fact that they are not under any form of State control. At any rate, here is the position. We have got a State Church which does represent the spiritual side of the nation, and on the whole represents it well, and we are asked to throw away this great influence on national welfare, to secularize the State, and to proclaim to all men that the nation in its corporate capacity has nothing whatever to do with religion, but, as we have said, ought to occupy itself solely with man's material concerns. And we are to do this in an age which all thinkers agree is specially in special danger from materialism !
We have one more comment to make on. the Disestablish- meat Bill. How is it going to be passed ? We all know that it is to be passed into law by Irish votes—that is, by the votes of men who, according to their own policy, ought not to have any right to interfere with the domestic affairs of this island. The whole case for the Home Rule Bill is that Ireland should manage her own affairs without inter- ference from England and Scotland, and that Irishmen should only have a claim to vote in the Imperial Parlia- ment on Imperial concerns, such as peace and war and the conduct and management of the Empire. And now, while preparations are being made for establishing this state of things, an attempt is to be made by means of what we may term a vote which has been condemned in regard to our domestic affairs to disestablish a portion of the English Church. A more unjust or a more impudent proposal to come from Homo Rulers and Federalists cannot be imagined. Surely the logical and also the honest thing for the Government to have done was to postpone Disestablish- ment till Home Rule had been passed. To declare that the Irish representation here ought to be reduced from 104 members to 42 members, as the Home Rule Bill declares, but to add that before this arrangement, so plainly de- manded by justice, takes place the great superfluity of Irish members shall be used to pass Welsh Disestablishment can only be described as an outrage. We, of course, as Unionists and believers in an incorporating Union, are perfectly willing that Irish members shall vote, and vote on an absolute equality in regard to all questions like Welsh Disestablishment. We regard the representatives of Kerry as having quite as good a right to say how matters shall be managed in Norfolk or Suffolk as the men of Norfolk or Suffolk have to say how matters shall be managed in Kerry. But then we are Unionists. For Home Rulers to say that certain fragments of the United Kingdoux must in justice be allowed to manage their own affairs, but before that reign of justice is inaugurated to take advantage of the presence of the Irish members to out away four dioceses from the English Church is Political brigandage pure and simple.
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