RELIGION
By THE DEAN OF EXETER
DEVELOPMENTS in religion are more observable than in some other provinces of life. Philosophy and science may in a single generation be utterly revolutionised, but one bald-headed old gentleman sitting at any period in either a library or a laboratory is very like another. Religion involves ceremonial proceedings, and it is natural that these should be staged differently as the generations pass. Religion touches daily habits ; it has even been known to bring about a change in the hour of breakfast. We therefore notice its effects.
It is right, however, to begin with the non-spectacular region in which all clergymen, as all philosophers, can look very like one another. Theologically, 1838 was pre-scientific. Geology had just arrived, and was found rather disconcerting. But Darwin was not yet, and it was not the custom to think in evolutionary terms. There was almost no Biblical criticism. A few scholars, Marsh, Thirlwall, Milman, had applied continental methods to the interpretation of the Scriptures, and were considered to be dangerous rationalists.
Ecclesiastically—and here the visibility was better—the Catholic revival had taken a strong hold on Oxford and was becoming known elsewhere. Newman wrote later of that period, " My position in the Anglican Church was at its height." It might be said that the years 1838-1839 were the end of the first stage of the Oxford Movement. Protestant opposition was developing. There was as yet no ceremonial, and no Eucharistic vestments, but it was evident that the Oxford men were claiming that the Church of England was a true part of the Catholic Church. This was enough to startle all but the few.
From another quarter Sydney Smith was pouring ridicule upon the " Puseyites," whom he called " those foolish people." But the charm of Sydney's clean, wholesome wit, of his political courage, and of a delightful sermon which he preached at the time of the Queen's accession, is spoiled by his shameless defence of the Church as " a system of prizes and blanks.". " A Church," he said in 1838, " provided for as ours now is, can obtain a well-educated and respectable clergy only by those hopes which are excited by the unequal division and lottery of preferment. This is the real cause which has brought capital and respectability into the English Church." It was this type of teaching, sordid as it was, which reached and pleased the dominating classes. They were not shocked by its worldliness, and they liked its political Erastianism, and its theological aridity. Lord Melbourne, though he was a student of the Fathers, did not become infected with Tractarianism, and it must have been of this period that Queen Victoria said in later life, " In my young days there was no Lent."
Those were hard times for non-Anglicans. The Roman Catholics had been emancipated, but they were still gravely suspected of being bad Englishmen, and George Eliot truly says that many a young Nonconformist Minister, who was constrained by his Liberalism to defend Emancipation, had to explain to his uneasy flock that this measure of earthly liberty would not make any difference to their ultimate fate. The Nonconformists themselves, relieved by the Repeal of the iniqtiitous Test Acts, were still excluded from the Universities and still compelled to pay Church rates. The Church was socially intolerant, and Nonconformists—who shall blame them ?—sometimes bitter. Dr. Binney went so far as to call the Established Church " a great national evil."
In more than one respect development was just ahead. Actual movements for Reunion were all in the future, some in the far future. But ideas were growing larger. The recently created Ecclesiastical Commission had delivered the Church of England from some of the abuses which sadly impaired its freedom to be what the Prayer Book had intended. Nepotism and non-residence began to disappear. Many sinecures were swept away, and the money thus liberated was used for Church work in poor and crowded areas. Coleridge had died in 1834, but Maurice was his heir. In 1838 Maurice published The Kingdom of Christ, or Hints to a Quaker Respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church. In the Dedicatory Preface to Derwent Coleridge he expresses his debt to the sage of Highgate, and subsequent events have proved that Maurice, though neither a Liberal nor a Socialist, was the father of Christian Liberalism and Christian Socialism. The Nonconformists were beginning to play a considerable part in English life, and one by one the old injustices, in regard to Marriage, Education, Taxation, Burial, and so forth, were to be removed. Best of all, English Christians began to understand their missionary duty. When Victoria was crowned there were only eight oversea Anglican bishops. The rest of the Anglican world was reckoned as in the diocese of London. In 1841 the CoIonia; Bishoprics Fund was founded and generously supported. The first-fruit of it was the sending of that heroic man, George Augustus Selwyn, to New Zealand.
By 1902 Christianity in England, as elsewhere, had passed through one of the severest testings of its history, and was all the better for it. Theology had met the shock of the new learning, and had become both scientific and historical. Opponents had often begun to read the Burial Service over the condemned institution, but somehow, as Figgis once said, " the thing still hung in the heavens." It had also, thanks to the Christian Socialists, and the Lux Mundi Group, begun to make a much more defiant impact on the intellectual and social life of man. Among the leaders of thought to whom this was due are Coleridge, Maurice, T. H. Green, Browning, Hort, Westcott, Acton, Fairbairn, Martineau. There were also men like Bright, Shaftesbury, Gladstone, Clerk-Maxwell, and Sir James Paget, who were not theologians but by their character had compelled respect for the faith to which they were devoted.
1902 was the year of the Balfour Education Act. It led to controversy, and was passively resisted by Dr. Clifford and his friends. This was unfortunate, but as an educational measure it marks an extraordinary improvement on the ideals of 1838. It was thought at the earlier date that any old dame could teach. The first Training College for Teachers (St. Mark's, Chelsea) was only founded in 1839. By 1902 the status of a great new profession, the Elementary School Teachers, whom Disraeli called in 1870 " a new priesthood," was securely established. In 1838 the total cost of Education to the State had been twenty thousand pounds. In 1902 it was almost as many millions. Today it is more than four times as much as that. Apart from w hat was called " the religious difficulty " in the Schools relations between Anglicans and Nonconformists, now commonly called Free Churchmen, and indeed between all communities of unhappily separated Christians, have steadily improved.
About this time Sir William Harcourt in Parliament and Mr. Kensit in less constitutional ways were denouncing the ceremonial practices of what were called " advanced churches." A Royal Commission was appointed, and its conclusion that " the law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation " led eventually to the Revised Prayer Book of 1928.
In 1911 the chief problem of the theological world was to determine the relevance and magnitude of the Apocalyptic element in Christianity. Schweitzer had startled everybody with his thesis that everything in the Gospels and indeed in Primitive Christianity was apocalyptic. There was enough truth in this to bring to an end the old Liberalism, made in Germany, and it was on the whole a clear gain for religion. But it took some handling. Both Loisy and Tyrrell were swept off their feet by it. It is remarkable that the discovery, or the rediscovery, of the fact that the Gospel is a thing that comes riding on the wings of storm should have been made just before the Great War, which torpedoed the old, calm belief in Evolution.
One of the most encouraging things in the attitude of 1937 to religion is that everyone takes the religious aspect of the Coronation seriously. Some don't believe it. Some dislike it. But no one thinks that it does not matter. When George IV received the Sacrament, no one was shocked. He was a rake ; but it was the custom ; it was even the law. Today the Recall to Religion has come to an intellectually honest generation. To us it is a painful thought that any Monarch should be required to do what is uncongenial or unreal to his religious convictions, and we are all glad to believe that to King George VI it is not only a duty but a happiness to " join in communion with the Established Church." God save the King.
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