A GO-AS-YOU-PLEASE CHURCH.
BY THE BISHOP OF DURHAM.
AREFORMED church which is also episcopal might seem of all reformed churches the most stable in doctrine and orderly in discipline, and it is the case that, in the earlier stages of its history, the Church of England was accustomed to lay great stress on its superiority over the other reformed churches, which were (save for the distant Church of Sweden) non-episcopal in these very particulars. In the bold phrase of South it was " the glory and strength of the Reformation." But times have changed with the Church of England, and now a passionate insistence on Episcopacy, as essential to the very being of a Christian church, commonly goes along with a frank repudiation of discipline. The latest version of the " Anglo-Catholic " claim is for nothing less than a com- plete paralysis of discipline, a demand all the more singular, and all the more vehemently pressed, because it is advanced in the name of " Catholic " principles. The Church of England, it is urged, in effect if not in so many words, shall cease to be in any sense a teaching church, its discipline shall be frankly cancelled, and in fact it shall become what can only be described as a go-as-you-please " church, in which a naked individual- ism expresses itself in an Asiatic luxuriance of rites and ceremonies, and doctrine is as elastic as worship.
When the " National Assembly " again addresses itself in November to the business of Prayer-book revision, it will not be the fault of the Anglo-Catholics if the issue at stake is not clearly perceived. The Chairman of the Congress, which arrested so much public attention last summer, has reissued with additions the letters which he wrote to the Morning Post, and everybody can now, at the small cost of one shilling, provide himself with an authoritative version of the Anglo-Catholic demand. The crisp decisiveness which marks the Bishop of Zanzi- bar's pronouncements disconcerts the more timorous or more prudent of his followers, but any specific repudia- tion of his statements is significantly absent. His pamphlet In Defence of the English Catholic may be accepted as the programme of the party.
The Bishop tells us that " Anglo-Catholics are only asking that the English Bishops should recognize their teaching as a legitimate interpretation of the Anglican formularies." " What they ask for," he says, " is official recognition." " They claim definitely that their dogmatic position be stamped as legitimate by the English Bishops to-day." When it is pointed out that both their practice and the doctrinal assumptions on which it rests are dis- allowed by the laws of the Church of England, and cannot even by the most complaisant casuistry be reconciled with the formularies which the English clergy are solemnly pledged to use, the Bishop answers that there is no such thing as " a consistent body of theology that can properly be called the peculiar teaching of the Church of England," that the Anglican formularies are patient of any meaning which the clergy may choose to place on them, that the legal subscriptions of the clergy are well known to possess no binding force, that the Bishops are aware of this when they, in circumstances of the utmost solemnity, receive these subscriptions from those whom they ordain and institute, and that, in fact, the Church of England has no independent existence at all. It is not, he insists, " an entity, an individual entity, apart from all other like societies." It cannot determine the doctrine of its own officers, or the modes of public worship in its own churches. Accordingly, the Anglo-Catholics demand " freedom of action." The laws and rubrics which prescribe the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England are to be cancelled, and the clergy shall be absolutely free to determine for themselves what shall be the type of teaching and the form of worship in the parish churches. The Bishop is far from desiring any special privilege for his own party. A similar liberty is to be conceded to other Anglicans, and a state of unchecked individualism is to be allowed within the National Church. " It seems to me that in these matters (i.e., illegal devotions) we ought to seek liberty of action. None should have these rites forced upon them : no faithful communicant, regular at Mass, should be deprived of them if they are found spiritually useful. And we all should learn to ' live and let live.' " The Bishop is convinced that this orgy of individualism will work out to the ultimate victory of " Catholicism "
" When I say that Anglo-Catholics are only asking that the English Bishops should recognize their teaching as a legitimate interpretation of the Anglican formularies, I do not mean that I wish to see three or four alternative religions under the auspices of our Bishops. Catholicism can ultimately have no rival, in the nature of the case. But as things are to-day we have first to obtain recognition, and then commend our gospel to men's consciences : there is no other way open to us."
The process is a little difficult to follow, but its broad result is clear enough. The Church of England is to cease to be a teaching, or an ordered church, wielding authority over its own officers, and is to become a " go-as- you-please " church without authorized teaching or en- forceable discipline. That is the Anglo-Catholic demand as formulated by the Chairman of the Albert Hall Con- gress ; and that is the issue which underlies Prayer-book revision. Will the National Assembly concede this demand ?
There is unquestionably a deep and widely-distributed desire to conciliate the Anglo-Catholics. It is felt that the religious situation in the country is such that almost any concessions are not too great if unity of purpose and policy could be secured. Outside the church the public feeling is hostile to every attempt to enforce discipline. Men of the world affect to be very contemptuous of ecclesiastical differences. Clear thinking and firm action are distasteful to modern democracies. Moreover, the practical convenience of yielding to the Anglo-Catholic demand would be obviously considerable. The Gordian knot of Anglican discipline would be cut by simply legalizing everything. The National Church would become merely an aggregate of diversely-ordered con- gregations, in which both harmony of teaching and uniformity of worship would be unknown. They would be replaced by a kaleidoscopic confusion of individual preferences.
Two conditions, however, would appear to be requisite before the ideal of a " go-as-you-please " church could be realized in England. First, the parishioners must acquiesce in the complete annihilation of their legal rights, and, next, the clergy must tolerate one another. It is, however, plain enough that neither of these conditions can be counted upon. Long-suffering as the parishioners have shown themselves to be, it would be foolish to assume that their patience is inexhaustible.
The Anglo-Catholics live so much in a world of their own that they do not often realize how repugnant to the English laity their whole conception of Christianity really is. If the acquiescence of the people is improbable, the mutual tolerance of the clergy is hardly less so. The Anglo-Catholic aggression is already rekindling the dormant fires of controversy. The consciences of zealots are not easily " brought to heel." Unchecked indi- vidualism involves confusion and conflict in the church as surely as in the State. In both alike order is the shield of liberty as well as the restraint of licence. It has ever been the boast of the Church of England that beyond other churches it permitted in its members a large liberty of opinion. Its formularies were conceived in a spirit of generous comprehensiveness. The authors of the Thirty-nine Articles, wrote Fuller in the midde of the seventeenth century, " did prudently prediscover that differences in judgments would unavoidably happen in the church, and were loath to unchurch any, and drive them off from an ecclesiastical communion for petty differences, which made them pen the Articles in com- prehensive words to take in all who, differing in the branches, meet in the root of the same religion." This generous liberty in matters of religious opinion, however, has gone along with insistence on a rigid uniformity in ceremonial. The last has in a sense conditioned the first, for the Mind of the Church is more authoritatively uttered in the ceremonial than in the preaching. " It is the unity of the ceremonial," wrote Archbishop Temple in 1898, " that makes the toleration of diversity of opinion possible." The Anglo-Catholics, by breaking the ceremonial laws of the Church of England, are forcing doctrinal issues into the foreground, and endangering the traditional liberty of theological opinion.
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