III Religion and the Church
I
A Strange Epiphany
Whenever the State meddles with the Church’s business, it contrives to make a muddle. This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected with the War. The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its special function, and its peculiar lesson. The function is to commemorate the revelation of Christianity to the Gentile world; and the lesson is the fulfilment of all that the better part of Heathendom had believed in and sought after, in the religion which emanates from Bethlehem. To confuse the traditional observance of this day with the horrors and agonies of war, its mixed motives and its dubious issues, was indeed a triumph of ineptitude.
[Footnote *: January 6th, 1918.]
Tennyson wrote of
“this northern island,
Sundered once from all the human race”;
and when Christians first began to observe the Epiphany, or Theophany (as the feast was indifferently called), our own forefathers were among the heathen on whom the light of the Holy Manger was before long to shine. It has shone on us now for a good many centuries; England has ranked as one of the chiefest of Christian nations, and has always professed, and often felt, a charitable concern for the races which are still lying in darkness. Epiphany is very specially the feast of a missionary Church, and the strongest appeal which it could address to Heathendom would be to cry, “See what Christianity has done for the world! Christendom possesses the one religion. Come in and share its blessings.”
There have been times and places at which that appeal could be successfully made. Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due. But for Europe at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India or China would be to invite a deadly repartee. In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world “rose out of chaos,” you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which “tare each other in the slime.” Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares. You still make your sons to pass through the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical science are those which make possible the destruction of human life on the largest scale. Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany and what it stands for.
Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote: “The present is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power and facility of the means of destruction. Science is hard at work (science, the great—nay, to some the only—God of these days) to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to annihilate the human race.” We see the results of that work in German methods of warfare.
Germany has for four centuries asserted for herself a conspicuous place in European religion. She has been a bully there as in other fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological pretensions. Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has renounced the religion of sacrifice for the lust of conquest, and has substituted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ. A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists.
If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking. The Infallibility which did not save the largest section of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these latter days. No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute; but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies of sexual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.
Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile Germany and in neutral Rome? I must confess that I cannot answer. We were always told that the force which welded together in one the different races and tongues of the Russian Empire was a spiritual force; that the Russian held his faith dearer than his life; and that even his devotion to the Czar had its origin in religion. At this moment of perplexity and peril, will the Holy Orthodox Church manifest her power and instil into her children the primary conceptions of Christian citizenship?
And if we look nearer home, we must acknowledge that the condition of England has not always been such as to inspire Heathendom with a lively desire to be like us. A century and a half ago Charles Wesley complained that his fellow-citizens, who professed Christianity, “the sinners unbaptized out-sin.” And everyone who remembers the social and moral state of England during the ten years immediately preceding the present War will be inclined to think that the twentieth century had not markedly improved on the eighteenth. Betting and gambling, and the crimes to which they lead, had increased frightfully, and were doing as much harm as drunkenness used to do. There was an open and insolent disregard of religious observance, especially with respect to the use of Sunday, the weekly Day of Rest being perverted into a day of extra amusement and resulting labour. There was a general relaxation of moral tone in those classes of society which are supposed to set a good example. There was an ever-increasing invasion of the laws which guard sexual morality, illustrated in the agitation to make divorce even easier than it is now. Other and darker touches might be added; but I have said enough to make my meaning clear. Some say that the war is teaching us to repent of and to forsake those national offences. If so, but not otherwise, we can reasonably connect it with the lessons of Epiphany.
II
The Romance of Renunciation
“What is Romance? The world well lost for an ides.” I know no better definition; and Romance in this sense is perpetually illustrated in the history of the Church. The highest instance-save One—is, of course, the instance of the Martyrs. When in human history has Romance been more splendidly displayed than when the young men and maidens of Pagan Rome suffered themselves to be flung to the wild beasts of the arena sooner than abjure the religion of the Cross? And close on the steps of the Martyrs follow the Confessors, the “Martyrs-Elect,” as Tertullian calls them, who, equally willing to lay down their lives, yet denied that highest privilege, carried with them into exile and imprisonment the horrible mutilations inflicted by Severus and Licinius. In days nearer our own time, “many a tender maid, at the threshold of her young life, has gladly met her doom, when the words that accepted Islam would have made her in a moment a free and honoured member of a dominant community.” Then there is the Romance of the Hermitage and the Romance of the Cloister, illustrated by Antony in the Egyptian desert, and Benedict in his cave among the Latin hills, and Francis tending the leper by the wayside of Assisi. In each of these cases, as in thousands more, the world was well lost for an idea.
The world is well lost—and supremely well lost—by the Missionary, whatever be his time or country or creed. Francis Xavier lost it well when he made his response to the insistent question: “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Henry Martyn lost it well when, with perverse foolishness as men accounted it, he sacrificed the most brilliant prospects which a University offers to preach and fail among the heathen, and to die at thirty, forsaken and alone. John Coleridge Patterson lost it well when, putting behind him all the treasures of Eton and Oxford, and powerful connexions and an opulent home, he went out to spread the light of the Gospel amid the isles of the Pacific, and to meet his death at the hands of the heathen whom he loved and served.
These, indeed, are the supreme Romances of Renunciation, but others there are, which, though less “high and heroical,” are not less Teal and not less instructive. The world was well lost (though for a cause which is not mine) by the two thousand ministers who on “Black Bartholomew,” in the year 1662, renounced their benefices in the Established Church sooner than accept a form of worship which their conscience disallowed. And yet again the world was gloriously lost by the four hundred ministers and licentiates of the Church of Scotland who, in the great year of the Disruption, sacrificed home and sanctuary land subsistence rather than compromise the “Headship of Christ over His own house.”
One more instance I must give of these heroic losses, and in giving it I recall a name, famous and revered in my young days, but now, I suppose, entirely forgotten—the name of the Honble. and Revd. Baptist Noel (1798-1873). “His more than three-score years and ten were dedicated, by the day and by the hour, to a ministry not of mind but of spirit; his refined yet vigorous eloquence none who listened to it but for once could forget; and, having in earliest youth counted birth and fortune, and fashion but loss ‘for Christ,’ in later age, at the bidding of the same conscience, he relinquished even the church which was his living and the pulpit which was his throne, because he saw danger to Evangelical truth in State alliance, and would go forth at the call of duty, he knew not and he cared not whither.”
After these high examples of the Romance of Renunciation, it may seem rather bathetic to cite the instance which has given rise to this chapter. Yet I cannot help feeling that Mr. William Temple, by resigning the Rectory of St. James’s, Piccadilly, in order to devote himself to the movement for “Life and Liberty,” has established a strong claim on the respect of those who differ from him. I state on p. 198 my reason for dissenting from Mr. Temple’s scheme. To my thinking, it is just one more attempt to stave off Disestablishment. The subjection of the Church to the State is felt by many to be an intolerable burden. Mr. Temple and his friends imagine that, while retaining the secular advantages of Establishment and endowment, they can obtain from Parliament the self-governing powers of a spiritual society. I doubt it, and I do not desire it. My own ideal is Cavour’s—the Free Church in the Free State; and all such schemes as Mr. Temple’s seem to me desperate attempts to make the best of two incompatible worlds. By judicious manipulation our fetters might be made to gall less painfully, but they would be more securely riveted than ever. So in this new controversy Mr. Temple stands on one side and I on the other; but this does not impair my respect for a man who is ready to “lose the world for an idea”—even though that idea be erroneous and Impracticable.
To “lose the world” may seem too strong a phrase for the occasion, but it is not in substance inappropriate. Mr. Temple has all the qualifications which in our Established Church lead on to fortune. He has inherited the penetrating intelligence and the moral fervour which in all vicissitudes of office and opinion made his father one of the conspicuous figures of English life. Among dons he was esteemed a philosopher, but his philosophy did not prevent him from being an eminently practical Head Master. He is a vigorous worker, a powerful preacher, and the diligent rector of an important parish. Of such stuff are Bishops made. There is no shame in the wish to be a Bishop, or even an Archbishop, as we may see by the biographies of such prelates as Wilberforce and Tait and Magee, and in the actual history of some good men now sitting on Episcopal thrones. But Mr. Temple has proved himself a man capable of ideals, and has given that irrefragable proof of sincerity which is afforded by the voluntary surrender of an exceptionally favoured position.
That the attempt to which he is now devoting himself may come to naught is my earnest desire; and then, when the Church, at length recognizing the futility of compromise, acquires her complete, severance from the secular power, she may turn to him for guidance in the use of her new-born freedom.
III
Pan-Anglicanism
It is an awful word. Our forefathers, from Shakespeare downwards, ate pan-cakes, and trod the pantiles at Tunbridge Wells; but their “pan” was purely English, and they linked it with other English words. The freedom of the “Ecclesia Anglicana” was guaranteed by the Great Charter, and “Anglicanism” became a theological term. Then Johnson, making the most of his little Greek, began to talk about a “pancratical” man, where we talk of an all-round athlete; and, a little later, “Pantheist” became a favourite missile with theologians who wished to abuse rival practitioners, but did not know exactly how to formulate their charge. It was reserved for the journalists of 1867 to form the terrible compound of two languages, and, by writing of the “Pan-Anglican Synod,” to prepare the way for “Pan-Protestant” and “Pan-denominational.” Just now the “Lively Libertines” (as their detractors style the promoters of “Life and Liberty”) seem to be testing from their labours, and they might profitably employ their leisure by reading the history of their forerunners half a century ago.
The hideously named “Pan-Anglican Synod,” which assembled at Lambeth in September, 1867, and terminated its proceedings in the following December, was a real movement in the direction of Life and Liberty for the Church of England. The impulse came from the Colonies, which, themselves enjoying the privilege of spiritual independence, were generously anxious to coalesce at a time of trial with the fettered Church at home. The immediate occasion of the movement was the eccentricity of Bishop Colenso—“the arithmetical Bishop who could not forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers.” The faith of some was seriously perturbed when they heard of a Bishop who, as Matthew Arnold said, “had learnt among the Zulus that only a certain number of people can stand in a doorway at once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day; and who tells us, as a consequence, that the Pentateuch is all fiction, which, however, the author may very likely have composed without meaning to do wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer’s.”
Certainly the tremors of a faith so lightly overset were justly obnoxious to Arnold’s ridicule; but Colenso’s negations went deeper than the doorway and the pigeons; and the faithful of his diocese, being untrammelled by the State, politely dismissed him from his charge. In England steady-going Christians had been not less perturbed by that queer collection of rather musty discourses which was called Essays and Reviews; and the Church of England had made an attempt to rid itself, by synodical action, of all complicity in the dubious doctrine. But the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had justified the essayists, and had done its best to uphold Colenso. By so doing, it had, of course, delighted all Erastians; but Churchmen, whether at home or abroad, who believed in the English Church as a spiritual society, with a life of its own apart from all legal establishment, felt that the time had come when this belief should be publicly proclaimed. In February, 1866, the Anglican Bishops of Canada addressed a Memorial to Dr. Longley, then Archbishop of Canterbury, requesting him to summon a conference of all the Bishops of the Anglican Communion; and, after some characteristic hesitation, this was done. A Letter of Invitation was issued in February, 1867. The more dogged Erastians held aloof; but those who conceived of the Church as a spiritual society obeyed the summons; the “Conference of Bishops” assembled, and the priceless word “Pan-Anglicanism” was added to the resources of the language.
What did these good men do when they were come together? Not, it must be admitted, very much. They prayed and they preached, and debated and divided, and, in the matter of Colenso, quarrelled. They issued a Pastoral Letter which, as Bishop Tait said, was “the expression of essential agreement and a repudiation of Infidelity and Romanism.” If this had been the sole result of the Conference, it would have been meagre enough; but under this official ineffectiveness there had been a real movement towards “Life and Liberty.” The Conference taught the Established Bishops of England and Ireland that the Bishops of Free Churches—Scottish, American, Colonial—were at least as keen about religious work and as jealous for the spiritual independence of the Christian society as the highly placed and handsomely paid occupants of Lambeth and Bishopthorpe. Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury (whom the Catholic-minded section of the English Church regarded as their special champion) “thought that we had much to learn from contact with the faith and vigour of the American Episcopate”; and Bishop Wilberforce thus recorded his judgment: “The Lambeth gathering was a very great success. Its strongly anti-Erastian tone, rebuking the Bishop of London (Tait), was quite remarkable. We are now sitting in Committee trying to complete our work—agree to a voluntary Court of English Doctrinal Appeal for the free Colonies of America. If we can carry this out, we shall have erected a barrier of immense moral strength against Privy Council latitudinarianism. My view is that God gives us the opportunity, as at home latitudinarianism must spread, of encircling the Home Church with a band of far more dogmatic truth-holding communions who will act most strongly in favour of truth here. I was in great measure the framer of the “Pan-Anglican” for this purpose, and the result has abundantly satisfied me. The American Bishops won golden opinions.”
And so this modest effort in the direction of “Life and Liberty,” which had begun amid obloquy and ridicule, gained strength with each succeeding year. The Conference was repeated, with vastly increased numbers and general recognition, in 1878, 1888, 1898, and 1908. The war makes the date of the next assemblage, as it makes all things, doubtful; but already Churchmen, including some who have hitherto shrunk in horror from the prospect of Disestablishment, are beginning to look forward to the next Conference of Bishops as to something which may be a decisive step in the march of the English Church towards freedom and self-government. Men who have been reared in a system of ecclesiastical endowments are apt to cherish the very unapostolic belief that money is a sacred thing; but even they are coming, though by slow degrees, to realize that the Faith may be still more sacred. For the rest of us, the issue was formulated by Gladstone sixty years ago: “You have our decision: take your own; choose between the mess of pottage and the birthright of the Bride of Christ.”
IV
Life and Liberty
The title is glorious; and, so far as I know, the credit of inventing it belongs to my friend the Rev. H. R. L. Sheppard, the enterprising Vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. Mr. Sheppard has what in newspapers we call a “magnetic personality,” and no one has more thoroughly laid to heart the sagacious saying that “Sweet are the uses of advertisement.” Whatever cause he adopts, the world must know that he has adopted it; and it shall obtain a hearing, or he will know the reason why. The cause to which (outside his pastoral work) he is just now devoted is that which is summarized in the phrase, “Life and Liberty for the Church of England.” It is a fine ideal, and Mr. Sheppard and his friends have been expounding it at the Queen’s Hall.
It was no common achievement to fill that hall on a hot summer evening in the middle of the war, and with very little’ assistance from the Press. Yet Mr. Sheppard did it, and he filled an “over-flow meeting” as well. The chair was taken by the Rev. William Temple, who tempered what might have been the too fervid spirit of the gathering with the austerity which belongs to a writer on philosophy, an ex-Head Master, and a prospective Bishop. The hall was densely crowded with clergy, old and young—old ones who had more or less missed their mark, and young ones keen to take warning by these examples. There were plenty of laymen, too, quite proud to realize that, though they are not in Holy Orders, they too are “in the Church”; and a brilliant star, if only he had appeared, would have been a Second-Lieutenant in khaki, who unfortunately was detained at the front by military duties. A naval and a military chaplain did the “breezy” business, as befitted their cloth; and, beaming on the scene with a paternal smile, was the most popular of Canons, who by a vehement effort kept silence even from good words, though it must have been pain and grief to him.[*]
[Footnote *: Alas! we have lost him since.]
The oratorical honours of the evening were by common consent adjudged to a lady, who has since been appointed “Pulpit Assistant” to the City Temple. May an old-fashioned Churchman suggest that, if this is a sample of Mr. Sheppard’s new movement, the “Life” of the Church of England is likely to be a little too lively, and its “Liberty” to verge on licence? A ministry of undenominational feminism is “a thing imagination boggles at.” Here it is to be remarked that the leaders of the movement are male and female after their kind. Dr. and Mrs. Dingo sit in council side by side, and much regret is expressed that Archdeacon Buckemup is still a celibate. But let us be of good cheer. Earnest-minded spinsters, undeterred by the example of Korah (who, as they truly say, was only a man), are clamouring for the priesthood as well as the vote; and in the near future the “Venerable Archdeaconess” will be a common object of the ecclesiastical sea-shore. Miss Jenkyns, in Cranford, would have made a capital Dean.
So much for the setting of the scene. The “business” must be now considered, and we will take the programme of “Life and Liberty” point by point, as set forth in a pamphlet by Mr. Temple. In the first place, its leaders are very clear that they wish to keep their endowments; but it must not be supposed that they dread reform. Their policy is “Redistribution.” Those great episcopal incomes are again threatened; the Bishops are to be delivered from that burden of wealth which presses so hardly on them; and the slum parson is to have a living wage. But the incumbent, though his income may thus be increased, is by no means to have it all his own way. His freehold in his benefice is to be abolished; and, even while he retains his position, he is to have his duties assigned to him, and his work arranged, by a “Parochial Church Council,” in which the “Pulpit Assistant” at Bethesda or Bethel may have her place. Life and Liberty indeed! But further boons are in store for us. We have at present two Archbishops, and, I hope, are thankful for them. Under the new scheme we are promised eight, or even nine. “Showers of blessing,” as the hymn says! I presume that the six (or seven) new Archbishops are to be paid out of the “redistributed” incomes of the existing two. The believers in “Life and Liberty” humanely propose to compensate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the diminution of his £15,000 a year by letting him call himself a “Patriarch,” but I can hardly fancy a Scotsman regarding this as a satisfactory bargain.
But how are these and similar boons to be attained? The promoters of Life and Liberty (not, I fancy, without a secret hope of frightening the Bishops into compliance with their schemes) affirm their readiness to accept Disestablishment “if no other way to self-government seems feasible”; but they, themselves, prefer a less heroic method. While retaining the dignity of Establishment and the opulence of Endowment, they propose that the Church should have “power to legislate on all matters affecting the Church, subject to Parliamentary veto.... This proposal has the immense practical advantage that, whereas it is now necessary to secure time for the passage of any measure through Parliament, if this scheme were adopted it would become necessary for the opponent or obstructor to find time to prevent its passage. The difference which this would make in practice is enormous.” It is indeed; and the proposal is interesting as a choice specimen of what the world knows (and dislikes) as Ecclesiastical Statesmanship.
“Life and Liberty”—there is music in the very words; and, ever since I was old enough to have an opinion on serious matters, I have cherished them as the ideals for the Church to which I belong. From the oratory of Queen’s Hall and the “slim” statesmanship which proposes to steal a march on the House of Commons I turn to that great evangelist, Arthur Stanton, who wrote as follows when Welsh Disestablishment was agitating the clerical mind.
“Nothing will ever reconcile me to the Establishment of Christ’s Church on earth by Sovereigns or Parliaments. It is established by God on Faith and the Sacraments, and so endowed, and all other pretended establishment and endowment to me is profane.” And again:
“Taking away endowments doesn’t affect me; but what does try me is the inheriting them, and denying the faith of the donors—and then talking of sacrilege. The only endowment of Christ’s Church comes from the Father and the Son, and is the Holy Ghost, Which no man can give and no man can take away.’”
Here, if you like, is the authentic voice of Life and Liberty.
V
Love and Punishment
Lord Hugh Cecil is, I think, one of the most interesting figures in the public life of the time. Ten years ago I regarded him as the future leader of the Tory party and a predestined Prime Minister. Of late years he has seemed to turn away from the strifes and intrigues of ordinary politics, and to have resigned official ambition to his elder brother; but his figure has not lost—rather has gained—in interest by the change. Almost alone among our public men, he seems to have “his eyes fixed on higher lodestars” than those which guide Parliamentary majorities. He avows his allegiance to those moral laws of political action of which John Bright so memorably said that “though they were not given amid the thunders of Sinai, they are not less the commandments of God.”
Now, the fearless utterance of this ethical creed does not tend to popularity. Englishmen will bear a good deal of preaching, so long as it is delivered from the pulpit; but when it is uttered by the lips of laymen, and deals with public problems, it arouses a curious irritation. That jovial old heathen, Palmerston, once alluded to Bright as “the Honourable and Reverend Member”; Gladstone’s splendid appeals to faith and conscience were pronounced “d——d copy-book-y”; and Lord Houghton, who knew the world as well as most men, said, “Does it ever strike you that nothing shocks people so much as any immediate and practical application of the character and life of Christ?”
Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous partisanship, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone. Just lately, his pronouncement that we ought to love the Germans, as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of God on earth, has provoked very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was “medieval.” For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one’s enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh’s doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is better than a short one.
Having thus repelled what I think a ridiculous criticism, I will admit that Lord Hugh’s doctrine raises some interesting, and even disputable, points. In the first place, there is the theory of the Universal Church as the Divine Kingdom on earth, and of the citizenship in which all its members are united. I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The “Enthusiasm of Humanity” is a noble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. Under the pressure of injury from without, cosmopolitanism must contract itself into patriotism. We may wish devoutly that the whole human family were one in heart and mind—that all the citizens of the kingdom of God obeyed one law of right and wrong; but when some members of the family, some citizens of the kingdom, have “given themselves over to a reprobate mind,” our love must be reserved for those who still own the claim of righteousness. If our own country stood as a solitary champion of right against a world in unrighteous arms, patriotism would be a synonym for religion, and cosmopolitanism for sin.
And then again I ask myself this question: Even assuming that Lord Hugh is right, and that it is our bounden duty to love the Germans, is love inconsistent with punishment? We postulate the love of God towards mankind, and we rightly regard it as the highest manifestation of what love means; but is it inconsistent with punishment for unrighteous action? Neither Revelation, nor Nature, nor History, knows anything of the conception which has been embodied in the words, “a good-natured God.” Of Revelation I will not speak at length, for this is not the place for theological discussion; I only remark in passing that the idea of punishment for wrong-doing is not, as some sciolists imagine, confined to the Old Testament, though there it is seen in its most startling form; in the New Testament it is exhibited, alike by St. Paul and by St. Paul’s Master, as a manifestation of love—not vindictive, but remedial. The disciplining love of a human father is used to illustrate the Divine dealings with insubordinate mankind. About Nature we need scarcely argue. “In the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins,” and rebellion against the laws of righteous living brings penal consequences which no one can mistake. And yet again, has History any more unmistakable lesson than that “for every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last”? Froude was right. “Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French Revolutions and other terrible ways.”
What we believe of the Divine Love, thus dealing with human transgression, we may well believe of human love, when it is called by duty to chastise unrighteousness. I do not suppose that John Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some people so bad that they “ought to be blotted out of the catalogue of living men.” It was the dispassionate judgment of philosophy on crime. When the convicted murderer exclaimed, “Don’t condemn me to death; I am not fit to die!” a great Judge replied, “I know nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live”; but I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock. Even so, though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of God, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent wrong-doing.
VI
Hatred and Love
I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: “Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do.” The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.
However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals. “The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet.” Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing a dog’s savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an exactly similar spirit may be concealed—and not always concealed—in a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination, still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the poignancy of the bitter saying: “I forgive him as a Christian—which means that I don’t forgive him at all.” Under a decent, though hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial Rome.
Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime. “Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold”; and there are unhappy natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. “I have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant? No? Well, I do.” It was a woman who wrote the words.
The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action, and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim. “Hatred,” said George Eliot, “is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred “steels the mind and sets the resolution.” If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and “steeled” into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred “steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do,” his psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as powerful as hatred to “steel the mind and set the resolution”—and the name of this other emotion is love. It required some resolution and a “steeled” mind for Father Damien to give himself in early manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the hands of “savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.” There was “steel” in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude of Tokat; and “steel” in an earlier and even more memorable decision when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit, fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing India.
But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on the human will is manifested. John Howard devoted the comforts and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing boys and factory slaves. If ever I knew a man whose resolution was “steeled,” it was this honoured friend of my early manhood, and the steeling power was simply love. A humbler illustration of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom worldly people ridiculed and who “for fifty years seized every chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school”; and this though a boy’s nature is “wax to receive, and marble to retain.” The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to be withheld.
I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind must be “steeled” and the resolution “set” for a solemn work of international justice. But hatred will not help us; for hatred is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise. Hatred is natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” Twelve men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they changed the face of the world. Are we to abjure the doctrine which wrought this change, and give heed to the blind guides who would lure us straight back to barbarism?
“What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign shall ye know them,
That they ruin and make dark;
“By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world’s desire;
“By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old Barbarian,
The Barbarian come again.”[*]
[Footnote *: G. K. Chesterton.]
VII
The Triumphs of Endurance
“By your endurance ye shall make your souls your own.” If the origin of this saying were unknown, one could fancy much ingenious conjecture about it; but no one, I think, would attribute it to an English source. An Englishman’s idea of self-realization is action. If he is to be truly himself he must be doing something; life for him means energy. To be laid on one side, and to exist only as a spectator or a sufferer, is the last method of making his soul his own which would occur to him. Dolce far niente is a phrase which could never have originated on English soil. The greater the difficulties by which he is confronted, the more gnawing becomes the Englishman’s, hunger for action. “Something must be done!” is his instinctive cry when dangers or perplexities arise, and he is feverishly eager to do it. What exactly “it” should be, and how it may be most wisely done, are secondary, and even tertiary, considerations. “Wisdom is profitable to direct”; but the need for wisdom is not so generally recognized in England as the need for courage or promptitude or vigour.
Some of the shallower natures find a substitute for action in speech. If only they talk loud enough and long enough, they feel that they are doing something valuable towards the desired end, and they find others, still weaker than themselves, who take their words at their own valuation. Who does not recall moments of the present war when the man-in-the-street has exclaimed, “That was a splendid speech of Blower’s! I feel now that we are on the right line”; or, “After what Bellowell said last night, there can be no going back to the discredited policy”? The man-in-the-street did not realize that Blower’s words are only articulated air, or that Bellowell could speak with equal effect whether his brief were to defend Belgium or to annex her. But alike the Englishman who acts and the Englishman who talks look askance on the people who think. Our national history is a history of action, in religion, in politics, in war, in discovery. It is only now and then that an Englishman can allow himself a moment for contemplation, for the endeavour to “see into the life of things,” for contact with those spiritual realities of which phenomena are only the shadows. Burke did it, but then he was an Irishman. Lord Beaconsfield did it, but then he was a Jew. Gladstone did it, but then he was a Scotsman. May I add that the present Prime Minister does it, but then he is a Welshman? Englishmen, as a rule, are absorbed in action; it is to them a religion, and it takes the place of a philosophy.
At this moment all England is acting, from the King and the War Cabinet to the children who play at soldiers in the gutter. There is no distinction of class, or sex, or temperament. All alike feel that they must be doing something to win the war, and that they would die or go mad if they were restrained from action. Limitations, physical or mental, incapacities for effort, restrictions of opportunity, gall as they never galled before. To compare great things with small, the whole nation pulsates with the spirit of the fiercely contested cricket-match:
“Oh, good lads in the field they were,
Laboured and ran and threw;
But we that sat on the benches there
Had the hardest work to do!”
Action, then, is the creed and the consolation of the English race, and God forbid that we should disparage that on which national salvation depends. The war must be won by action; but in the strain and stress of these tremendous days we are tempted to forget that there is something to be won or lost besides the war. It is possible to conquer on the Western front, and at the same time to be defeated on the not less important field of moral being. The promise which heads this paper was uttered in full view of an impending agony which should crush religion and civilization into powder. We can realize the consternation with which a patriotic audience heard those premonitions from the lips of a patriotic Teacher; but in the midst of all that was harrowing and heart-rending came the promise of triumph through endurance. “Ye shall make your souls your own.” The gloomy and the cheerful prediction were alike made good.
“The East bow’d low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
“So well she mused, a morning broke
Across her spirit grey;
A conquering, new-born joy awoke,
And fill’d her life with day.”
The Roman Eagles led a momentary triumph, but they fled before the newly discovered Cross. Endurance won.
And so it has been from that time to this. The triumphs of endurance have no end. The barbarism of the Cæsars, the barbarism of Islam, the barbarism of Odin and Thor, all in turn did their uttermost to destroy the new religion. Persecution fell, not on armed men strong to resist, but on slaves and women and boys and girls. “We could tell of those who fought with savage beasts, yea, of maidens who stept to face them as coolly as a modern bully steps into the ring. We could tell of those who drank molten lead as cheerfully as we would the juice of the grape, and played with the red fire and the bickering flames as gaily as with golden curls.” These were the people who by endurance made their souls their own; and, by carrying endurance even unto death, propagated the faith for which they gave their lives. It did not take Rome long to discover that “the blood of Christians is seed.”
The victorious power of endurance is not yet exhausted; but, on the other hand, the peril of moral defeat must never be ignored. It was a strange coincidence that the most trying phase of a four-years’ war should have occurred in the week which, for Western Christendom, commemorates the supreme example of endurance. As far as action is concerned, the national will is not in the slightest danger of collapse. The British nation will plan, and work and fight for ever, if need be. Our only danger is in the moral field. Though our power of action is undiminished, our power of endurance may ebb. We may begin to cry, in our impatience, “Lord, how long?”; to repine against the fate which condemns us to this protracted agony; to question within ourselves whether the cause which we profess to serve is really worth the sacrifices which it entails. It is just by mastering these rebellious tendencies that we can make our souls our own. If we went into the war believing in the sacredness of Freedom, Brotherhood, and Right against Might, it would be a moral collapse to emerge from it believers in tyranny, imperialism, and the rule of the strong. “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” On that “end” we must keep heart and eye unflinchingly fixed; and strive to add one more to the age-long triumphs of endurance.
VIII
A Solemn Farce
Sweet to the antiquarian palate are the fragments of Norman French which still survive in the formularies of the Constitution. In Norman French the King acknowledges the inconceivable sums which from time to time his faithful Commons place at his disposal for the prosecution of the war. In Norman French the Peers of the Realm are summoned to their seats in Parliament which they adorn. In Norman French, the Royal Assent has just been given to a Bill which doubles the electorate and admits over six million women to the franchise. All these things are dear to the antiquary, the historian, and (perhaps we should add) the pedant, as witnessing to the unbroken continuity of our constitutional forms, though the substance of our polity has been altered beyond all recognition.
Another instance of Norman French which has lately emerged into unusual prominence is the “Congé d’élire.” We can trace this “Licence to Elect” from the days of the Great Charter downwards; but it will suffice for my present purpose to recall the unrepealed legislation of Henry VIII. “It was then enacted that, at every future avoidance of a bishopric, the King may send to the Dean and Chapter his usual licence (called his ‘Congé d’Élire’) to proceed to election; which is always, accompanied by a Letter Missive from the King containing the name of the person whom he would have them elect; and if the Dean and Chapter delay their election above twelve days the nomination shall devolve to the King, who may then by Letters Patent appoint such person as he pleases.... And, if such Dean and Chapter do not elect in the manner by their Act appointed they shall incur all the penalties of a præmunire—that is, the loss of all civil rights, with forfeiture of lands, goods, and chattels, and imprisonment, during the Royal pleasure.”
Such are the singular conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those “greater Chapters” which consist of Honorary Canons, longing for more substantial preferment. It would indeed require a very bold flight of fancy to imagine those worthy and comfortable men exposing themselves to the “loss of civil rights, the forfeiture of goods and chattels, and imprisonment during the King’s pleasure,” for a scruple of conscience about the orthodoxy of a divine recommended by the Crown. Truly in a capitular election, if anywhere, the better part of valour is discretion, and the Dean and Chapter of Hereford have realized this saving truth. But my view is wholly independent of local or personal issues, and is best expressed by these words of Arthur Stanton, true Catholic and true Liberal: “I am strongly in favour of Disestablishment, and always have been. The connexion between Church and State has done harm to both—more, however, to the Church. Take our plan of electing Bishops. In the early centuries they were elected by the people—as they ought to be. Now they are chosen, sometimes by a Tory, sometimes by a Radical Government. The Dean and Chapter meet and ask the guidance of the Holy Ghost to enable them to choose, knowing all the while they have the ‘Letter Missive’ in their pockets. To me this comes perilously near blasphemy.”
But let us suppose an extreme case. Let us imagine a Dean and Chapter so deeply impressed by the unsuitableness of the Crown’s nominee that they refuse to elect him. Here, again, the law dodges us. Except as a protest their refusal would have not the slightest effect. The Crown has nothing to do but issue Letters Patent in favour of its nominee, and he would be as secure of his bishopric as if the Chapter had chosen him with one consent of heart and voice. True, he would not yet be a Bishop; for the episcopal character can only be conferred by consecration, and at this point the Archbishop becomes responsible. To him the King signifies the fact that Dr. Proudie has been elected to the See of Barchester, requiring him to “confirm, invest, and consecrate” that divine. Should the Archbishop refuse compliance with this command, he exposes himself to exactly the same penalties as would be inflicted on a recalcitrant Chapter, only with this aggravation—that he has more to lose. When my good friend the Bishop of Oxford addressed the Archbishop of Canterbury, imploring him to withhold consecration from Dr. Henson, he made a valiant and faithful protest against what he holds to be a flagitious action on the part of the Crown; but, knowing the respected occupant of Lambeth as well as he does, I think he must have anticipated the reply which, as a matter of fact, he received.
Such being the absurdities and unrealities which surround the Congé d’Élire, one naturally asks, Why not abolish it? This question was raised in a pointed form by the late Mr. C. J. Monk, for many years Liberal M.P. for the City of Gloucester, who, in 1880, introduced a Bill to abolish the Congé and to place the appointment of Bishops formally, as it is really, in the hands of the Prime Minister. He urged the painful sense of unreality which clings to the whole transaction, and the injury to religion which is involved in thus paltering in a double sense with sacred forms and words. It is amusing to those who can recall the two men to remember that Mr. Monk was opposed by Lord Randolph Churchill, who thought he perceived in the proposal some dark design hostile to the interests of the Established Church; but the important speech was made by Gladstone. That great man, always greatest in debate when his case was weakest, opposed the abolition of the Congé. He deprecated any legislation which would interfere with one of the most delicate functions of the Crown, and he insisted that the true path of reform lay, not in the abolition of the form of election, but in an attempt to re-invest it with some elements of reality. This was well enough, and eminently characteristic of his reverence for ancient forms of constitutional action; but what was more surprising was that, speaking from long and intimate experience of its practical working he maintained that the Congé d’Élire, even under the nullifying conditions now attached to it, was “a moral check upon the prerogatives of the Crown,” which worked well rather than ill. “I am,” he said, “by no means prepared to say that, from partial information or error, a Minister might not make an appointment to which this moral obstacle might be set up with very beneficial effect. It would tend to secure care in the selections, and its importance cannot be overstated.”
I must confess, with the greatest respect for my old leader, that the “importance” of the Congé d’Élire as a restraint upon the actions of the Prime Minister can be very easily “overstated.” Indeed, the Congé could only be important if the Capitular Body to which the “Letter Missive” is addressed have the courage of conscientious disobedience, and were prepared to face, for the sake of imperilled truth, the anger of the powers that be and the laughter of the world. Courage of that type is a plant of slow growth in Established Churches; and as long as my friends hug the yoke of Establishment, I cannot sympathize with them when they cry out against its galling pressure. To complainants of that class the final word was addressed by Gladstone, nearly seventy years ago: “You have our decision: take your own; choose between the mess of pottage and the birthright of the Bride of Christ.”