MR. BRIGHT ON THE CHURCH.
W. BRIGHT'S speech on Monday has so much disappointed those who were looking for a declaration on the recon- straction of the Liberal party, that they have not done justice to the force of the protest which he did make against the principle of a Church Establishment. Widely as we differ from Mr. Bright's conclusion, we can by no means agree that the speech for its own special end was not a fine 9ne. There are bits of irony in it worthy of Mr. Bright's greatest efforts,—as when he recounted the various cases in which " special legislation " of the restraining kind had been needed, the case of publicans, for instance, and of " marine-store dealers," and garotters, and persons " so extra- ordinarily savage as to beat their wives," and closed his list with the most exceptional class of all, namely, thousands of men " on whose consecrated heads the hands of the Bishop had been planed," and who are nevertheless " so lawless as to need special legislation to curb them,"—Mr. Bright's object being of course to show that a State Church is a failure even on the one ground on which it is most often regarded with favour, as a mainstay of the Law. But the strong point of Mr. Bright's speech was its deliberate moderation, the anxious care he took to guard against the supposition that this question was in any way matured, the earnestness of his caution against making it a condition of loyalty to the next Liberal leader that he should be ready to adopt Mr. Bright's view of this question, and the candid, though almost puzzled admis- sion, interpolated in the course of his attack on the legislative fetters which it is sought to impose on religious zeal, that in religion as in other matters there is "very much zeal which is unwise " and " not very much that is wise at all times." These are remarkable evidences that Mr. Bright's speech was certainly not what it was hastily called by a contemporary on Tuesday, " a sectarian declamation," or " a long tirade against the Established Church." It was nothing of the kind. It was a very carefully-weighed and a powerfully-expressed con- tribution to a special view of a very great subject, on which, for the moment, the English public care little more than they ,do for the local disputes, say, of the Bahamas or the political grievances of the Caucasus ; and this in spite of the fact that everybody who professes to prophesy in politics assures us with the utmost confidence that the doom of the Establish- ment is fixed, and that a " manifest destiny" decrees the separa- tion of the Church from the State in all civilised countries. For ourselves, we do not so read the signs of the times. We believe, too, that Mr. Bright, who has a very shrewd insight into these matters, does not so read them himself. He sees that a period of tepid belief and strong scepticism is not a period in which even the extravagances of a knot of theoretic clergymen —who seem to us, by the way, to have a much keener feeling of the strength of the things they ought to believe than of the strength of the things they do believe—are likely to have the effect of breaking up one of the most venerable of English institutions, and one, too, which even at the present day, and in spite of all the obvious exceptions to this view of its tendencies, is essen- tially moderating in its effects on English society. And it is because he sees this,—so, at least, we read his speech,—that Mr. Bright makes a great effort to draw the lesson which, as he thinks, ought to be drawn from the recent ecclesiastical campaigns,—not, indeed, as a practical hint to the politicians of the hour, but as a contribution to the political meditations of those who would form the convictions of the next generation of Liberals.
The general drift of Mr. Bright's speech certainly has no speculative novelty in it, and it is rather a strange criticism upon it to say that if he had watched carefully the course of public opinion, " he would have seen the necessity of introducing some novelty at least into an attack on the Church." We, as friends of the Establishment, may perhaps see such a necessity. But if the foes of the Establishment saw it, they would not re- gard it with the deep distrust they do. It is not novelty which converts the public to any political opinion, but the forcible and timely illustration of old principles by new events. This was what Mr. Bright attempted,—quite inadequately, we think, but certainly not without force and brilliance. His main point was, that in attempting to renew the Act of Uniformity, and re-enforce it on the Church of to-day, the object men are really driving at, whether un- consciously or consciously, is to sweep all earnestness out of the Church, and to repopulate it with the light and facile spirit of the lawyer who is willing to accept any brief, and to argue any opinion. There was very great power, and all Mr. Bright's old faculty for irony, in the contrast between Sir William Harcourt's view of what a clergyman ought to be, and the eager zeal, wise or unwise, which animates men who suppose that they have a divine lesson to teach. Sir William Harcourt had remarked, with that easy view of our moral resources which characterises his type of mind, that if one set of priests refuse to conform, we shall find others, as we have found before, who will obey the national faith. And this was Mr. Bright's criticism :—" I doubt if he will find it very easy to procure pious, and earnest, and learned men to take these offices on the kind of terms which I have quoted. I think he must have forgotten somewhat the rock from which he was hewn, and he must be thinking more of the profession to which he is now attached. No doubt the members of that profession take either side of a case. The brief comes from the plaintiff or from the defendant, and in either case probably is equally welcome ; the fee comes from this side or from that, and it adds to the emolument of his professional revenues. And Sir W. Harcourt may have thought that the position of a teacher in the Church,—a position the most elevated and sacred to which man can be called,—can be taken by men, and numbers of men, without caring in the least what it is that their conscience teaches them, or what they believe to be the truth, but that merely for so many hundreds a year they will willingly accept the office and conform to what he calla the national faith." In other words, Mr. Bright suggests that those who are most willing to impose a new Act of Uniformity on the Church resemble the late Solicitor - General,—who for some time seemed to hang suspended between the attractions of Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone,—in thinking it almost equally easy to preach whatever opinion is the most "convenient," while those who are the bitterest against such suppleness of religious faith, are the only ones fitted to impress the world with the spirit of religion. The Established Church, if it is to be governed at all under the conditions which have so recently became popular, must be garrisoned by Laodi- ceans of the Ex-Solicitor-General's type. But the Estab- lished Church, if it is to be effectual at all, must be garrisoned by men of the type who repudiate the Ex- Solicitor-General, as St. John repudiated the Laodiceans. And Mr. Bright goes on to illustrate the difficulty of getting earnest men to agree on religious subjects by contrasting the views seriously held in the Church,—the view of Bishop Colenso with the view of those who inhibit him, and this, again, with the view of those who in the face of that inhibition, ask him to preach,—and the view of Bishop Wordsworth; who refuses the title of ' Reverend' to a Wesleyan minister, with the view
of those who would not blame Sir William Harcourt for calling him ' a learned simpleton ' for so doing. And he leads us to infer from all these sharp contrasts that to impose a new Act of Uniformity on a Church which is, in fact, as regards belief, a group of different Churches com- bined in one communion, would be chimerical and hopeless ; while to let things alone would be to leave the mischievous sacerdotal zeal of the new movement to accumulate without that restraint which the English laity who support the State Church, and who have no sympathy with zeal of that kind, have some right to demand. Of course, Mr. Bright recommends disestablishment as the only legitimate remedy,—the only remedy which neither strives to reduce zeal to tepidity by secular motives, nor makes the nation which regards such zeal as ill-directed more or less responsible for it. Indeed, Mr. Bright evidently believes that a disestablished Church could not be dangerously sacerdotal ; nay, he points to the Wesleyan Church and the Free Church of Scotland, and asks if we find the same panic there on the score of desertion to Rome as we find in the Establishment.
Now, that seems to us, on the whole, a powerful, though by no means an unanswerable case of Mr. Bright's. We en- tirely agree with him that if a new and more stringent Act of Uniformity, drawn on the old theological lines, is really to be passed, and rigidly enforced, it will both split up the Estab- lished Church as a matter of fact, and render that Church, strictly speaking, mischievous and utterly unworthy of defence as a matter of principle. But then we also agree with him that Parliament was so unanimous as it was last Session because it was in a panic, and did not know what it was about. After time for cool dis- cussion, we believe it will discover that it was a unanimity of spasm, and not a unanimity of reflection, which produced the Public Worship Regulation Act. Hence we decline en- tirely to concede that the question of Disestablishment is to be discussed on the assumption that the principles of that Act will irrevocably guide the policy of Parliament in future ; but if indeed it is to be so, if Sir W. Harcourt's demand for a clergy that will conform their belief quietly to legal standards, no matter what these are, nor how obsolete some of these modes of thought may be, is to be complied with,—then we go heartily with Mr. Bright that there is nothing left for it but Disestablishment, and what would follow Disestablish- ment as certainly as night follows day, the pulverisation of the Church into at least three or four distinct sects. But if, on the contrary, that blunder of last Session is, as Mr. Bright himself evidently thinks equally probable, to be repented and ignored, then all the argument founded on this new rigidity of doctrinal uniformity, disappears. Nay, it is far from improbable that there might be before long a dis- tinct and considerable relaxation of the fetters imposed on clerical belief, within those limits of comprehension which suit a Reformed Church. And in that case, the only argument of much weight in Mr. Bright's speech which would remain, is his argument from the tendency which an Establishment appears to him to have to breed Sacerdotalism. and Romanism. Now, there we hold him altogether mistaken. Doubtless, an Episcopal Church, as such, is much more likely to feed the Church of Rome than any other. You always find that in a Church.of hierarchical form, there will be a party that finds a deep theological foundation for the hierarchical form, and which gravitates therefore to the sacerdotal principle ; but such a party exists just as much in the tiny Episcopal Church of Scotland, which is not established, and in the large Episcopal Church of America, which is not established, as in our own. Again, the very freedom of opinion hitherto not only allowed, but protected, by the State, has enabled this extreme hierarchical party in the Establishment to go further without breaking away altogether, than it could generally have gone in a voluntary Church, even of the Episcopal kind ; and to this extent the ex- travagance of the Ritualistic movement is due not intrinsically to the fact of an Establishment, but to the much greater freedom admitted in an Establishment than in a voluntary Church, where the teacher depends for his moral and physical support on voluntary zeal. But while we admit that an Episcopal Church has necessarily in it seeds of Romanism which would not be found in a non-episcopal Church, and that the guarantee of substantial doctrinal freedom ensures the development of all inherent tendencies—whether in the hierarchical or the anti-hierarchical direction,--equally, we entirely deny that the Establishment as such has had anything to do with the Romanising movement except to check and diminish it Un- questionably the Establishment has kept the Bishops moderate. Unquestionably the Establishment has fostered in the great majority of the clergy a sturdy individualism which has made even the Ritualists thorns in the sides of their Bishops, and prevented many from going over to Rome solely because it would be impossible for them in the Church of Rome to set their Bishops at defiance as they do here. It is not the Estab- lishment which has fostered the Romanising movement; indeed. we believe that from a disestablished Episcopal Church there would be many more seceders. But it is the Establishment which has kept up the habit of respecting liberty of opinion, of tolerating the wide differences even amongst those who are nominally members of the same Church. And that most salutary habit would, we fear, very speedily disappear, if Mr_ Bright's ideal ecclesiastical policy were ever to be realised for the people of England.
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