TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE VOLUNTARY SYSTEM OR GENERAL ENDOWMENT.
CERTAIN Ultra Hi Churchmen in both Houses of Parliament have declared, that 0V-would prefer an universal voluntary sys- tem—the putting away of all establishments—to the endowing of two or or three religions. Such expressions are probably intended by the speakers as mere figures of rhetoric : with them, to declare a preference for voluntaryism, is nothing more than a striking, assertion of the impossibility of their approving gene- ral endowment. Educated in seminaries under the control of their Church—mingling in no society but that of Churchmen, more or less exclusive—to them the doctrines of Dissent are mere ab- stract speculations. They cannot imagine that there are nume- rous and active bodies of men to whom ideas so inconsistent with their own habitual notions are animating and directing principles of action.
Nothing short of this blindness can account for the appeals addressed by men like Sir Robert Harry Inglis and the Bishop of Cashel to the sympathies of the Dissenters. The Dissenters have willingly joined in the outcry against the additional grant to .Maynooth College ; but, to do them justice, they have not concealed their ulterior objects. They frankly tell their allies, that they object to the Maynooth Endowment Bill not as an isolated measure but as an extension of the principle of religious endowment ; they "record their solemn protest against the Pro- testant Church Establishment already existing in these realms." Ignorant of the numbers, zeal, and energy of the men who make this declaration, the Ultra High Churchmen flatter themselves that they can make tools of such "fanatics," and discard them when their purpose is served. Yet the protest is recorded by the very parties whose perfect organization, no further gone than last session, in an incredibly short space of time inundated the House of Commons with petitions so numerous and so nume- rously signed as to force the Government to withdraw its educa- tional measure. Between the zealous Voluntaries on the one hand and the advocates of ,,aeneral endowment on the other, the Bishop of Cashel may be called to make his election earlier than he has any idea.
It is not improbable that the Legislature may be called upon to solve practically the problem of Church Establishments before the full extent and various bearings of the question are distinctly understood. When the moment for decision arrives, some of the most sincere and zealous Voluntaries may shrink from the prac- tical enforcement of their own abstract..principles. They tell us, that a Christian minister ought to depend for his support exclu- sively upon the voluntary contributions of his own flock. In Scotland—where the voluntary principle has made most progress, and is most clearly understood—an agreement is entered into be- tween every new minister and his congregation, that the minister shall receive a certain annual salary; but of late the ministers have declined to accept of bonds to this effect from the congregations. This principle strikes at the root of private quite as much as of public endowments for religious purposes. A permanent endow- ment for the support of ministers professing a certain creed, by a private individual, is quite as likely to tempt clergymen to con- form for motives of lucre, and private individuals to join the con- gregation from motives Of economy, as a permanent endowment from the state. And yet the parties who have struggled so per- tinaciously in the courts of law to have certain trust-funds trans- ferred from Unitarians to their own body, are not very likely to approve of the application of this principle in its extreme rigour. They have as much cause as the most unquestioning members of an established church to ask themselves what their principles really are, and to what practical conclusions they lead.
The question of state endowments—of an established church— is essentially a political question. The essentials of church- organization are the exercise of discipline and the maintenance of pure doctrine by constitutional office-bearers. The Roman Catholic, the Anglo-Episcopal, the Presbyterian—all churches that have at any time accepted state support—have accepted it upon this understanding. The assertion of a right to state support by established churches has been more peremptorily asserted by some than by others ; but the right of each church to be ad- ministered and legislated for in all spiritual matters, in- dependently of the state, by its own constitutional office-bearers alone, has been alike asserted by all. The state is regarded by all churches as a more or less intimately allied but still as an alien authority.
The nature of the promise held out—of the obligation contracted by the state to an endowed or established church—will best appear from a review of the rise and progress of endowment. The most prominent distinctive feature between the Christian church and the hierarchical systems (with the exception of the Jewish) upon the ruins of which it rose, is the extent to which it combines instruction with the observance of devo- tional rites. The Christian ministers have from the beginning been teachers as well as a priesthood. The essential part of their instruction was a system of morals ; but it is difficult to trace the limits of moral theory, and there are many subsidiary branches of instruction which facilitate moral instruction. In ancient Europe, as in the isles of the Pacific in our own day, the tuition of the Christian priesthood always embraced more topics than morals. And it was to this circumstance in France
and England of old, as in the Sandwich Islands in the nine- teenth century, that the Christian religion was indebted for the first endowments it received from governments. Kings and other chief magistrates—many of them imperfect converts or obstinate unbelievers—made liberal grants to Christian priests, sometimes because along with their peculiar creed they taught many things useful to all, sometimes because their practical morals improved society, be their doctrines true or false. The same governments which gave liberally to the church protected it in the possession of the gifts of private benefactors. At first the state gave and the church accepted endowments, the former with- out professing to be disciples, because they thought the priest- hood a useful and respectable body ; the latter because it recog- nized in the liberality of unbelievers the influence of Heaven to provide for the maintenance of its own ministers. When Christianity came to be, as the superstitions it dis- placed had been, beheved by multitudes, simply because it was the only religion of which they had ever heard, and because they had heard its precepts from childhood—and still more, when the progress of industry, wealth, and knowledge, had raised the peoples to a sense of their own consequence—the position of the church was altered : it was no longer protected by the govern- ment, but upheld by the nation. It had ceased to be a missionary and had become a really established church. Its business was now less to instruct than to minister to spiritual wants, which its earlier missionary labours had created. The field of knowledge had been parcelled out among its cultivators, as it became too ex- tensive to be comprehended in all its details by any one mind. Secular knowledge and secular teachers had grown up. The priesthood were more restricted to religious instruction, and that instruction was now instilled in childhood instead of being ad- dressed to adults. The time of the priesthood was engrossed by their ministerial duties : they were called upon to initiate the young into the body of the faithful, to be ever at hand as counsel- lors and friendly guides of the grown-up, and to smooth by their exhortations and encouragements the bed of death. As at first the clergy were supported by enlightened governments against brutish races who rejected their purer morals, so now the clergy were supported by the people, to whom they had become indis- pensable, when needy or arbitrary governments sought to lay hands on their property or exact dishonourable services from them.
The growth of that independent spirit which the acquisition of property by private individuals calls into existence, and the pro- gress of knowledge, created a desire for more precise and definite information in religion, as, in everything else. Men inquired more narrowly, attempted tolorm more definite, ideas, and conse- quently opinions became more diversified and multifarious. And. at the very time that this process was going on, the comparative restriction of the priesthood to mere ministerial duties had left them beyond the general intelligence of their age. The great Reformation, or the great Schism, was the consequence. Relaxa- tion of discipline had much to do with it, but dogmatical differ- ences still more. Each section into which the church was divided sought to strengthen itself by drawing up a definite and compre- hensive profession of faith. Even the representative of the old united church—the Church of Rome—was obliged for the first time to promulgate such a body of doctrine in the articles adopted by the Council of Trent. There was no spirit of mutual conces- sion or toleration in any of the multifarious churches. They have been brought to endure each other merely by the conviction that they must. The strength of each has consisted in its falling heir to a portion of that support from public opinion which had pre- viously upheld the undivided church against attacks from kings and princes. Some governments were friendly to the new sects, some adhered to the old, but the maintenance of all has depended upon the hold they had taken on the popular mind. In almost every instance, the governments of Europe have been obliged to recognize that church to which the majority of the people adhered.. The churches of minorities, in almost every case where they have asserted their right to toleration, have owed their success to the assistance of foreign churches. Three hundred years have rather augmented than diminished the number of Christian sects and the sharpness of the distinctions between them. The experience of three hundred years has taught us that the schism in the church is not to be healed by human means or in the ordinary course of events.
What, in this posture of affairs, is the duty of states in respect to churches? Of the mixed motives which first insured to the church the countenance and liberal donations of government, one has ceased to exist : the secular instruction, to obtain which at the hands of a missionary priesthood has always been a main object with the governments of rude nations, is now provided for by other institutions. The indirect use of a church to a state arises in modern times from the beneficial influence exerted by its priesthood in the discharge of their ministerial duties. Every European government must of necessity stand to a greater or less number of its subjects and their clergy in a relation pretty similar to that in which unconverted governments in old times stood to their Christian subjects and priesthood. Apart altogether from the question of the abstract right of government to take upon itself the missionary office, experience has shown that government cannot. It is out of the power of any government to create an universal national church. If it is to patronize the church as a useful moral engine, it must patronize all sects alike. But to this the sectarian spirit of the age seems adverse. Even those sects which have no objection to receive endowments from the state claim them as due to the soundness of their doctrine, and repudiate the extension of the principle of endowment to other sects. As long as government persists in endowing any sect or sects, all the rest seem resolute to make this a pretext for con- verting the legislature into an ecclesiastical council. The legisla- ture cannot settle religious controversies, (any more than any church council has ever been able to settle them,) and the time wasted in the fruitless attempt is withdrawn from business which it is competent to discharge. To judge from the present aspect and attitude of our various sects, the time seems rapidly approaching when the state will of necessity abandon the attempt to patronize any form of religion ; when government will be driven to declare- " It is impossible to adjust your discordant claims. The zeal which animates you is a guarantee that each sect will make ade- quate provision for a succession of office-bearers. This is all that the state could do ; and therefore every church must in future be left to take care of itself, and every man's religion considered, as between• him and the state, a matter of mere private concern." This is the conclusion to which irreconcileable differences of opinion appear to be hurrying us. Even they who without being wedded to any sectarian opinion would have the state patronize religion in the abstract, too often add to the difficulty by recom- mending for this patronage a system of doctrines selected from or compounded of all the jarring creeds already in existence.
Previous page
