MR. GLADSTONE AND THE CHURCH.
EVERYBODY is sadly disappointed with Mr. Gladstone's essay on the Church, in the new number of the Con- temporary, but we do not know that the disappointment is very reasonable. People expected too much. Deceived by the somewhat pretentious title, "Is the Church of Eng- land worth Preserving ?" which has evidently been devised since the article was written, they thought they were going to see Mr. Gladstone's full opinion about Establishments, or about the condition of the Church, or at all events about Ritualism ; and when they find he has been writing about a much smaller subject they are disappointed, and accuse him of publishing very dull stuff. Mr. Gladstone, however, evidently intended only to give his opinion, the 1st of July having arrived, the day on which the Act for the Regulation of Public Worship comes into operation, on the safest course for the probable litigants to pursue, and taken as an exposition of that comparatively humble thesis, the paper is not without interest or merit. It is a plea by a moderately High Church- man in favour of allowing differences in the Church, and especially differences of one particular kind, to exist without litigation, for fear of secessions which, in the writer's judgment, must rend the Church to pieces, and would certainly end in the severance of its connection with the State. The tendency of the day, says Mr. Gladstone, is to "import into questions concerning the externals of re- ligion the element of devotional significance." People do not fight about the nature of the Eucharist, or even about the legality of certain acts of external usage in cele- brating the Eucharist. but about the symbolic signification which may be imported into those acts. They are not con- tending whether a minister of the English Church ought or ought not to stand with his face to the east while consecrating the elements, but insisting that that posture inevitably implies a particular explanation of the meaning of the rite. Those who defend and those who repudiate "orientation" are alike positive that they defend or repudiate the Real Presence— whether in the Roman Catholic or the Protestant sense—and so elevate a mere form observed by many sound Protestants on the Continent into the importance of a definite and extreme doctrinal utterance. This assumption Mr. Gladstone holds to be some- what irrational, as well as exceedingly dangerous to the Church, and he explains his opinion by a striking illustration. It would be just as sensible, he says, to argue that, because a Catholic must kneel at the Communion, because he recognises the Real Pre- sence, therefore every Protestant who takes the Communion kneeling must mean by his attitude to imply that he accepts that doctrine. Notoriously he does not mean anything of the kind, but "nothing would be easier than to annex to the kneeling attitude of the receiver in the Holy Eucharist the colour and idea of adoration of the Consecrated Elements." If the Church, while retaining kneeling as the proper posture, "has resolutely thrust aside the extreme construction which might have rendered it intolerable," why may she not be held to have avoided the extreme construction of the practice of" orienta- tion?" The fact that both parties repudiate any other explanation than the extreme one is, he contends, not germane to the matter : —" It may indeed be said, and not untruly, that in a certain sense both the friends and the adversaries of the practice I have been considering are agreed in attaching to it the mean-
ing I presume to deprecate. Where both parties to a suit are agreed, it is idle, we may be told, to dispute what they concur in. Now, the very point I desire to bring into clear view is that this is not a suit with two parties to it, but that many, perhaps most, of those who are entitled to be heard, are not before the court ; many—aye, multitudes—who think either this question should be let alone, or that if it is not let alone, history, and science, so far as they are found to inhere in it ; not judged by patches of glaring colour, the symbols of party, which are fastened upon it from without. If this be a just view, the concurrence of the two parties named above in their construction of the eastward position is no better a reason for the acquiescence of the dispassionate community, than the agreement of two boys at a public school to fight in order to ascertain who is the strongest, is a reason against the interference of bystanders to stop them if they can." To force a doctrinal significance on a mere posture or on vest- ments ordered by King Edward's rubric is, he contends, as un- fair as to impute motives for a sound political measure, a practice "which in the secular world is taken as the indication of an illiberal mind and a short-sighted policy." Not only is it unfair, but it is dangerous, because all ecclesiastical litigation in England turns on these postures and vestments; and if doc- trinal significance is forced on them, then in the public imagi- nation doctrines are being decided, and there will be secessions which the Church of England, strong as it is, and it is very strong, has no reserve of superfluous strength to enable her to bear. She is, in Mr. Gladstone's mind, in the position of an army quite strong enough to resist its adversary, but so nearly equal to him in strength, that the mutiny of a regiment, and far more the desertion of a regiment, may de- stroy the equilibrium and expose her to defeat. Or to quote Mr. Gladstone's own words: "The Church of this great nation is worth preserving ; and for that end much may well be borne. In the existing state of minds, and of circumstances, preserved it cannot be, if we shift its balance of doctrinal ex- pression, be it by an alteration of the Prayer Book (either way) in contested points, or be it by treating rubrical interpretations of the matters heretofore most sharply contested on the basis of 'doctrinal significance." Litigation, therefore, on rubrical interpretations ought to be avoided by all true friends of the Church.
This is the substance of Mr. Gladstone's counsel, though, as usual, he has forgotten that he was writing and not speaking, and has conveyed it in the multitude of words which would have been needed to convey his thought to a listening audience, and it seems to us sensible and sound, though perhaps a little weak. If the bigots within the Church of all shades of opinion will insist on prosecuting everybody who adopts attitudes allowed by law, because they may imply extreme doctrines, the Church of England will certainly either cease to exist, or cease to be comprehensive enough to have any claim to existence. Some decision is certain to be given some day which will be taken to affirm or deny some vital doctrine, in which case there will be secession ; or some litigating party will refuse to obey some decision because it imagines it to cover doctrine, in which case that party must go. The former is the more probable cause of an Evangelical secession, the Evangelicals not being annoyed by the character of the deciding tribunal ; and the latter the more probable cause of a High Anglican departure, the latter disliking not only the decision, but its own amenability to the lay tribunal which pronounces it. If the two factions can therefore keep from litigation, the Church will be decidedly safer, because without so much risk to its comprehensiveness. But then, will this con- sideration influence the disputants enough to make them abstain from litigation ? We doubt it greatly. It certainly will not influence the highest Churchmen, who say that they are bound to provoke their congregations to a perception of the truth by impressing on them the doctrinal significance of symbols; and it will hardly influence the Recordites, who are unable to bear a Church which tolerates symbols that may be in- terpreted as symbols of extreme—i.e., in their mouths— Catholic doctrines. The conflict between these two is a real one, and it is upon this point that Mr. Gladstone's counsel appears to us to be weak. We will concede that the mass of Churchmen dislike all this contention about rubrical directions, and are prepared to endure great varieties even of doctrinal opinion—though there are limits to this, especially when a doctrine involves a sacerdotal pretension—but the men who will fight by litigation do not belong to that mass. They are in earnest, or furious, or fanatic, and no argument about the safety of the Church will stop them for an hour. They
do not want it to be established, if establishment means toleration in one Church of too broadly divergent opinions. To speak to them on behalf of the thou- sands of moderates, is to tell French duellists that the majority of Frenchmen dislike and do not practice the duel. What is that to them ? The majority ought to like it, and for
themselves they will stand by their own convictions about honour. The way to prevent litigation in the Church is to widen the law till within certain limits each party is secure of a legal right to exist ; but this Mr. Gladstone, well knowing the difficulties, does not so much as recommend, and while the law remains as it is, each party will continue to wish to prove that his adversary's position is untenable. The mode of proof selected may be absurd—we fully agree with Mr. Gladstone on that point— but still it is the one which in all countries and ages has been selected. The parties have always agreed in forcing a doc- trinal meaning on a symbol, and fighting round that. The earliest fight in the Church—that between Hebraism and Catholicity—was fought nominally about circumcision, to which both parties gave the extreme Hebraistic significance; and from that day to this a phrase, or a genuflexion, or a vestment, has been held to convey adhesion to a whole body of doc- trine. When the attitude, or phrase, or vestment has been ordered by law, and historically has no doctrinal meaning-- as is certainly the case with kneeling, which is not the reveren- tial attitude of the majority of mankind, and was not the reverential attitude of Jews, and is not prescribed by Christ,—it is most unfair to force one upon it ; but the world has always forced one when it wanted to quarrel about a doctrine, and it is vain to teach it justice. A red night- cap may not be communist, but if a man traverses Paris and says his cap is a symbol of Communism, the first Ultra- Conservative he meets will assume that it is, and try to pluck off the unoffending bit of wool. The quiet Parisians may wish the bonnet let alone just as much as they like, but unless legislation makes it lawful they will not prevent the fight. Mr. Gladstone's counsel of conciliation will, we greatly fear, prove to be a counsel of perfection, which every one rather respects, and would rather act up to if he could, but which in a work-a-day world has wretchedly little influence over human affairs. The Church of England, we fear, must trust for the present not to any absence of suitors, but to the instinctive dislike of Englishmen to see a suitor either disobey the decree, or hurl inkstands at the Judge who has pronounced it. Dr. Swainson says he preferred the eastward posture till he found it was held to imply an ex- treme doctrine; then he disliked it ; but he shall like it again if the Tribunal decides that the doctrine is not legally implied. There are a good many Dr. Swainsons still in the Church of England.
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