MR. SPURGEON AND THE BAPTIST UNION.
WE have always entertained a very sincere respect for Mr. Spurgeon, and regard him, indeed, as one of the most earnest, honest, and high-minded of the religious teachers of the day, though not one of the most discriminating. His retirement from the Baptist Union, on the ground that the Baptist Union is extending its comprehensiveness to the point of sanctioning false religious teaching, is a new evidence of his strength of character and manliness of conduct, though he grounds his retirement partly on the toleration extended to some forms of opinion with which we ourselves feel considerable sympathy. Mr. Spurgeon maintains that it is a " wretched spectacle" to see "professedly orthodox Christians publicly avowing their union with those who deny the faith, and scarcely concealing their contempt for those who cannot be guilty of such grave disloyalty to Christ." He thinks that Unions which lead to such tampering with Christian truth, are not Christian Unions, and "begin to look like confederacies of evil." Rather than belong to what bids fair to become " confederacy of evil," he and his congregation prefer to stand by themselves as orthodox Baptists who will be responsible only for their own faith, and not for the gradually decaying faith of the Baptist latitudinarians. "Believers in Christ's Atonement," writes Mr. Spurgeon, "are now in declared religious union with those who make light of it ; believers in Holy Scripture are in confederacy with those who deny plenary inspiration ; those who hold Evangelical doctrine are in open alliance with those who call the Fall a fable, who deny the personality of the Holy Ghost, who call justification by faith immoral, and hold that there is another probation after death, and a future restitution for the lost." Though we regard what Mr. Spurgeon means by plenary inspiration, as the wildest of impossibilities which was certainly not even dreamt of by the primitive Church,—and though we regard the question of a further probation after death as one which the Christian revela- tion does not in the least condemn, confining itself as it does almost exclusively, in connection with the subjects of reward and retribution, to impressing on us the consequences of holi- ness and sin, while it keeps secret what it does not concern us to know,—the limits within which our trial will extend, —we still feel the deepest respect for Mr. Spurgeon's un- compromising attitude towards what he regards as disloyalty
to Christ's teaching. But the interest of the occasion seems to us to be the tendency which Mr. Spurgeon's course must have to stimulate the decomposition of ecclesi- astical Unions into their constituent parts, and the gradual disintegration of what we may call collective responsibility for a creed. Of course, if once that collective responsibility were to cease altogether, and there should come to be as many entirely separate opinions on the character and drift of revela- tion, as there are, for instance, on the character and drift of Mr. Ruskin's teaching, Christian faith as a bond amongst men would have ceased to exist. It was as a bond, and as a yoke as well as a bond, that it first came into existence. It united a number of persons whom it severed altogether from the world of that primitive day, giving them a separate class of joys, a separate class of hopes, and a separate standard of duty, and it united them by subduing them to a new and welcome yoke in a new kind of service. If ever all the estimates formed of the meaning of Christ's revelation came to be purely individual, and so different from each other that they ceased to subdue those who hold them to a common standard of hope, joy, and duty, Churches as such would cease to exist, and would be resolved into something very like either mutual discussion societies, or reunions of the admirers of the religious attitude of some particular orator. Yet Mr. Spurgeon is quite right in his evident conviction that this tendency towards the disin- tegration of Churches will certainly not be checked by patch- ing up hollow truces under the shelter of which people who differ totally in their belief may continue to be described by the same name. That sort of disintegration is not less serious than the other. A nominal union of worshippers who are really wide asunder in belief, are none the nearer for not confessing that they are in complete disagreement with each other ;—perhaps they are even further off from actual union than they would be if the truth were known, for there is no divergence of purpose so final as that which remains concealed chiefly on account of the complete indifference of those who are becoming estranged in heart to the fact of that estrangement. The Church which really contains large masses of nominal adherents who do not share the same beliefs and the same hopes, and who do not even acknowledge the same duties, is a rope of sand, and not a Church. Hence, though Mr. Spurgeon's abandonment of the Baptist Union is sure to stimulate the tendency to an open disintegration of religious communions, we do not at all suppose that it will stimulate the real disintegration of faiths. The decay of com- mon convictions which was latent before, will not be aggra- vated in any way by being avowed.
Nay, it may, we think, do good by awakening men afresh to the very serious character of the question as to the con- nection between doctrine and religious communion. What was it that originally made the Christian Church ? Was it not a perfectly new vision of God's character, actions, and purposes, and the consequent transformation which took place in human aims and hopes ? Of course, that implied a common theology, and a common theology of a very new and startling kind ; but what Mr. Spurgeon at least evidently means by doctrine was rather the implication than the absolute essence of that theology. The facts which changed men's hearts were the evidence that God had done marvellous things in order to make man different from what he had been, and the doctrine was rather the explanation and analysis and co- ordination of the divine actions, than the actions them- selves. Such matters, for example, as Mr. Spurgeon refers to,—plenary inspiration of Scripture, or eternal hopelessness for those who die without belief in Christ,—are in the highest degree remote from the divine facts the belief in which gave such new and extraordinary strength of cohesion to the first Christian community : probably neither of these doc- trines was either held or so much as canvassed or even con- ceived by any one of the writers in the New Testament. What filled them with wonder and common joy and common hope, was the life and death and resurrection of Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. All the so-called doctrinal theology was due to reflection on these facts, and the attempt to hold them intelligently and coherently. We believe that the more there are of these honest confrontings of modern difficulties with ancient doctrine, the more we shall come to see that, after all, the essence of unity in a Church is what it believes concerning God's mind and character and action and active manifestation in history, concerning the divine sacrifice and suffering on our behalf,—in short, concerning the secrets of the divine nature, so far as they affect our standards of life and duty. The unity of a Church is and must be deeply affected by the belief or scepticism of its members as to what God really is, and has shown himself to be by actual interposition in human affairs. But it need not surely be affected by their common belief or common in- difference in relation to matters of such extremely indirect concern with our life and duty as the partial fallibility of sacred historians, prophets, or even apostles, or the limits of the mercy with which those human beings may be treated in another world who have never had what most of us would call a fair chance of a true moral probation in this.
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