BOOKS.
THE ANGLICANS AND THE AGE.*
"TUE Church, without relation to the Age," would have been in some respects a better title for this goodly volume ; which we have no intention, as we have no qualification, to review in anything like detail. It proceeds from a party so perfectly well satisfied with 'Anglican' principles, and so entirely intent on improvements of a purely executive and administrative kind in working them out, that we have read some parts of it with the sort of wondering dis- comfort which Goethe expressed in contemplating a picture of a flock of sheep by the animal painter Roos. "I get uneasy," said Goethe, "when I look at these animals. The limited, dull, dreaming, gaping repose of their condition attracts me into fellow- feeling : one fears becoming such a creature oneself, and might almost believe the artist was such a one. Any way, it is really one of the most astonishing things in the world how he has been able to think and feel himself into the nature of these creatures, so as to let their inner character be seen so clearly through their outer form. One sees, however, what a great talent can achieve, if it sticks to subjects which are appro- priate to its nature." And when Eckermaun asked if the same painter had not painted dogs, predatory animals, or even men, with like fidelity, Goethe answered in the negative, explaining that all
• 7'4e Church and the Age. Essays on the Principles and Present Position of the Anglican Church. Edited by Archibald Weir, D.C.L., Vicar of Hartz Hall, Enfield, and William Dalrymple Maclagan, MA., Rector of Newington, Surrey. London: Murray.
that lay out of his beat, but that he was never tired of paint- ing "the pious (frommen) grazing animals, like sheep, goats, cows, and so forth." The pious grazing animals ! Is there not some- thing frightfully analogous in the devotees of a comfortable, limited, established faith, which meets everything spiritual outside its own area not with frank respect, or even wonder, and anxiety, and pain, and questionings of the heart, but with comfortable apathy such as might be appropriate towards a substance of a foreign order, with which it is no further concerned than the oxen in a field are with the meat and wine of the mowers?
For instance, Dean Hook begins the volume with an ex- planation of the ' Anglican ' principles on which it is based. Those principles, be explains, when once deliberately adopted, do not necessarily (except for one to whom controversy is a duty) need frequent review, and it is not at all essential that an Anglican should be able even to recall the grounds on which he adopted them, at all events if he is satisfied that be did once adopt them after deep, earnest, and adequate investigation. If really satisfied of this, an Anglican is quite right in dismiss- ing any fresh difficulties or problems which may be presented to him, with the remark that they are in conflict with his deliberately adopted Anglican principles which he is not called upon to re-examine, and therefore unworthy his attention. Supposing, for instance, the Tubingen school of theology comes to him with its asserted proofs of a conflict between opposite tendencies—the Petrine and the Pauline—in the early Church, and of a third party of conciliation which endeavoured to minimize the difference between the two, the good Anglican should merely decline to look at the evidence, stating that at some earlier period of his life he made up his mind that principles were true which are inconsistent with any such asserted split and reunion in the early Church. Now there is so startling a tranquillity in such an attitude of mind as this in such an age as ours, especially when proceeding from a school that looks so little likely to hold its own as the ' Anglican ' in Dean Hook's sense, that we read his and some of his collabora- teurs' essays in a kind of trance, such as might hang over a. world of theological lotos-eaters, among whom it was 'always afternoon.' Not that these essayists are practically asleep. In practical energy and work, they are, evidently enough, among the most earnest and active of the Church's servants. Whatwe refer to is simply their soporific intellectual tran- quillity in that charmed circle of Anglican repose, while all the outer world is swept by whirlwinds of doubt and dis- belief of which almost all these writers seem, as far as we can see, absolutely unconscious. Just consider what the Anglican principles announced by the Dean of Chichester in his opening essay are :—They are the principles of the Reformed Church of England, the principles of the Church of England as reformed between the accession of Henry VIII. and the Revolution, "since which the Church of England has remained stationary." The first of these principles is the principle of "the continuity of the Church," viz., that the "post-Reformation is only a development of the pre-Reformation Church," and the principle on which the Refor- mation was conducted was, according to Dr. Hook, to remove all practices which could not be justified by Scripture, as interpreted by the tradition of the early fathers. " We refer to the writings of the early fathers not for their opinions, but for the witness they bear to certain facts. Our desire is to ascertain what was delivered orally by the Apostles with respect to doctrine or discipline in the Churches they founded, some of them before the Scriptures of the New Testament were written. We do this, not because we think the Scriptures insufficient, but to enable us, especiallyon disputed points, to understand the Scriptures and to elucidate what is obscure." Accordingly, the conclusion to which Dr. Hook comes is that the true standard for the Church is, and always was, the written testi- mony of the Bible as interpreted by the parole-evidence (afterwards gradually committed to writing) of the generation which was nearest to the Apostles, and that it is in this sense that the formu- laries laid down at the Reformation should be interpreted. Very well,—but what a strange lot of paradoxes to present to the world ! In the first place, here is a Church without any power of develop- ment in it, and without any wish for development according to the Anglican party, which Dr. Hook admits to be devoid of any authority for the expulsion of heresy, and to have been " sta- tionary " ever since the revolution, yet asserting itself to be only the " development " of the pre-Reformation Church, which, say what you will of it, was a Church with plenty of vital movement in it and a very distinct historical unity Dr. Hook admits that if any member of the Church of England now won't take the proper view of the formularies accepted at the Reformation, there is no help for it beyond his own conscience. Does that look No doubt there is one exception to this line of thought. The essay of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol has a wider sweep in it. Dr. Ellicott writes on "The course and direction of modern religious thought," and, as was to be expected from him, shows that he is perfectly alive to the narrow limitation of the circle within which alone 'Anglican' principles can be assumed as identical with religious principles, and as the axioms of the religious life. He recognizes a steady drift in the latest intellectual discus- sions of Christian principles towards purely humanitarian views of Christ, and towards a free handling of the Scriptures which tends to "decompose the Bible into an aggregation of treatises of varying age, character, and value, in respect of which no more reasonable account can be given why these particular treatises and no others should have been preserved than could be given in respect of the lost and extant portions of the histories of Livy." So far the Bishop shows an insight into the surgings of religious opinion round Dr. Hook's quaint little island of Anglican ' principles ' which gives his essay far more general interest than any other in this volume. But we confess that his sug- gestions as to the best way of maintaining the Anglican position do not strike us as very hopeful. With regard to the interpretation of Scripture, Dr. Ellicott suggests that those entrusted with a great Gospel must have been specially qualified so to record it as to fit it for the acceptance of mankind, and that, therefore, it is difficult
for anybody who believes in a divine revelation at all not to assume that special providential interposition was exercised as to the
arrangement of the record. Very well ; but how does an a priori suggestion answer a posteriori difficulties ? Grant the Bishop's assumption, and it only follows that where there is plain confusion, or contradiction, or error in what we call the record, there can be no part of the essential divine revelation. What authority have we for supposing that the writers of the various books of the Bible were not only inspired what to write, but also Sot to write any- thing except what was inspired ? Grant that God must have provided for the record of all that was spiritually essential for the souls of future believers, why are we to assume that He provided for the record of nothing else ? Are we to suppose, for instance, that the hyperbolic and extravagant statement in the verse probably added by later hands to the Gospel of John, to the effect that if all Christ's doings and sayings had been recorded, the world itself could hardly have contained the books which would have been written,—of course, we mean exaggerated and extravagant,' supposing this to refer to His human and not to His divine life,— • Kamm,. By William Black. 3 vols. London : Sampson Low. exactly like a Church which is continuous with the pre-Refortna- was providentially added ? Are we to suppose that it was due to tion Church? Then, as to this rule of the written Bible as interpreted by the parole-evidence of the earliest tradition, if that is to satisfy, or even so much as attempt to satisfy, the diffi- culties of the present day, it ought to be defended and illustrated with all the resources of the most able men of the party,— whereas after its bald statement by Dr. Hook we hear hardly any more of it, and the essayists write in the apparent conviction that "the Ago" will jump at such a basis for faith as this. 'Why, if "the Age" is to be addressed at all, we should have thought that at least half the essays should have been devoted to an attempt to reconcile such a set of principles with the intellectual tendencies by which it is most deeply penetrated. What will his- torical criticism say to the assumption that the early fathers and the canonical writers are all at one with each other ? Should we not have had two or three essays on that? What will modern science say to the glimpses of scientific theory in the Bible and in the early fathers alike P Should we have had nothing on that? What does modern philosophy say to the spiritual philosophy of the Bible,—should there not have been a strong point made of that ? Instead of essays thus intended to reconcile the very essence of the ' Anglican ' ideas with the best tendencies of the Age,' or at least to show distinctly their true relative position, we have essays on "the Synods of the future," on " the religious use of taste," on "the place of the laity in Church government," on the functions and duties of "the parish priest," on "English divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," on "liturgies and ritual," on "Indian missions," on "the Church and education," on "the Church and the people,"—this last essay not being meant to popu- larize the ideas of the Church, but to discuss the best modes of dis- seminating them, and on "conciliation and comprehension,"—all of them essays to the authors of which it never seems to occur that the Anglican ideas themselves need examination, interpretation, definition, and recommendation to the most earnest minds of the day, but who seem to take them for granted, too often almost as if they had never heard of any alternatives, and only to be anxious to discuss,—of ten with much ability,—the questions of administra- tive policy which they suggest. divine providence that the books of Ecclesiastes and Nehemiah were preserved and that an epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians was lost ? Are we to suppose that it was by divine providence that the dates of our Lord's short career on earth became so confused that scholars of the highest authority still doubt whether his public ministry extended over only one full year or three ? Are we to suppose that it is by divine providence that the Song of Solomon was preserved in the Canon and that the book of Ecclesiasticus was excluded from it ? Is it due to divine providence that the early chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke as to our Lord's birth are all but irreconcilable, and that neither St. Mark nor St. John con- tains any account of it at all ? Granting that all must be contained in the record which God sees to be needful for the permanent influence of the revelation, what can be more difficult,—almost unreasonable, we might say,—than to assume that nothing which happens to be bound up with it, or even written by the same writers in connection with it, is altogether outside the revelation ? And once grant that last position, and the necessity for that 'free handling' of the Bible which the Bishop so much deprecates comes back at once. Dr. Ellicott is far too reasonable a man to assume that the Bible was, so to say, edited from beginning to end by the Holy Spirit. It is contrary to all the phenomena of the case to suppose it. Yet as he does not fall back on the Church as the divine interpreter of the Bible, either this must be his posi- tion, or else his a priori argument against the free handling of the Bible falls to pieces altogether.
And so, again, with the spiritual philosophy of his essay. Instead of attempting, what we think he might profitably have done, so far to justify the Nicene theology as to show that it provides an answer to some of the greatest problems of human nature, he rather takes his stand upon it as axiomatic, and consoles the specu- lative intellect of the age with the suggestion that the redemp- tion of man by the incarnation of our Lord may answer a pur- pose in the counsels of God altogether outside any which seems to concern our own little world at all ;—just as an astronomer might suggest that it may be the destiny of our system to fill up the gap in the stellar universe caused by the extinction of some of the mighty suns which have burned themselves out. Dr. Ellicott, pointing to a few obscure passages in the Bible, suggests that as angelic sin is spoken of as antecedent to human sin, so the redemp- tion our race may have been intended to fill up a gap in a hierarchy of Comical beings originally far above our own ; and this he thinks. may be a grand speculative apergn that is not unlikely to reconcile 'modern thought' to the theology of the Church. Alas ! does he not see that what modern thought hungers after so eagerly is not, so to say, moral room, or space, or magnitude of ideal conception, but positive evidence, distinct constraint to believe as distinct from right to conjecture ; and that no spiritual conjectures, no grand spiritual rumours, however brilliant, will bring the minds of this untoward generation to rest in a theology for which they can only have the authority of a vision and a wish ?
The Church and the Age may do good service in helping men who are absolutely content with Anglican principles to work out those principles practically in the school, the parish, and the synod ; but it will hardly contribute an iota to reconcile any element in "the Age" to Anglicanism which now stands outside the range of those principles. Indeed, with few exceptions, it seems to be written by men who think of the world beyond Anglicanism almost as a hyperborean wilderness with which no common understanding is. at present desirable at all.
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