Dryden's criticism of Elkanah Settle: His style is boisterous and his prose incorrigibly lewd." But the tyranny of the Record was, in its day, as oppressive and very much much more powerful. And the movement whose dregs the Church Times represents is a declining movement. The Dean of St. Paul's tells us that it "must soon begin to break up, owing to certain internal contradictions which the enthusiasm of its adherents has hitherto masked or ignored." It has, however, rendered an important service to English religion, though this service does not consist in the revival of mediaval belief and ceremonial with which it is associated. Rather it will be found in the accentuation of the community-element in the assent of faith. We do not come to Christianity from without or as isolated and individual units; if we did, I do not know what our judgment on it would be. But we approach it as heirs of a Christian civilisation, as citizens of a Christian nation, as members of a world-wide Christian community or Church. This sense of community is to us what the proof from miracles or prophecy was to a former generation. Protestantism tends to lose sight of it-to the injury of religion; Catholicism tends to emphasise it-to its gain. XIII. A few years ago the Free Church of Scotland gave us a memorable lesson in the power of development inherent in and inseparable from a living Christian community. The real question at issue in the prolonged litigation which began in the Scottish Courts in 1900 and ended in the 1 The Churchman, February, 1912. E 66 power ; that House of Lords in 1904 was, What constitutes a Church? To the contention of the minority, known as the "Wee Frees," that the identity of a Church consisted in the identity of its doctrine-they protested, consistently enough, against the Declaratory Act adopted in 1891 by the General Assembly-the representatives of what is now the United Free Church answered that this was not so ; that a Church had to legislate upon, and so to change doctrine it "might adopt a new Confession of Faith." The one limit was its own notion. To change, it must be the Church; and it would cease to be so did it repudiate the two conditions necessary to its own conception"the Headship of Christ, and His word as its only rule." If this were not so, if the unity of the Church consisted in creed-content, not in persistence and permanence of direction, we should still be teaching the imminence of the Second Advent; the Millennium; the powerlessness of the Church to remit sin after baptism; the damnation of the unbaptised; verbal inspiration; the duty of persecution; a penal, arbitrary, and endless hell. Static religion is "seeming wise" and seeming pious; we must "launch out into the deep." "But [says a great Scottish Churchman] this assertion of freedom is not of the kind that fosters arrogance; rather it is akin to reverence and godly fear. We have much to hold fast. We are conscious, by God's grace, of our possession of a great body of doctrine, which through the word and also through the providence of God in the history of the Churches, through the fidelity of martyrs and fathers, through the great return to Scripture 1 "Free Church of Scotland Appeals," p. 545. Edinburgh, 1904. of the Reformation, through many particular conflicts and revivals, became clear and dear to our fathers, and has become so also to us. We value the life and the traditions we inherit, though we refuse, and we need to refuse, to place them in the room of our living Head or of His word. We own some benignant purpose of God in the genealogy of Church life in which He has cast our lot, and in the peculiar influences which are derived to us from past history. We are not insensible to this; we are not tired of it; but it must not run into idolatry. We desire to draw from our history, for ourselves and those who come after us, all the good it has carried with it. We are not ashamed of our fathers. But they taught us that one is our Head, even Christ, and that this holds not only for the individual Christian, but for the Church, for that peculiar society which He created and has promised to sustain." 1 These weighty words of Principal Rainy put the question on its proper level. It is a high one. The loyalty of the Christian is not to the traditions of men, but to the truth of Christ. XIV. The conditions under which reconstruction, or doctrinal and ceremonial changes short of reconstruction, can properly be brought about vary in different Churches. In Scotland the Barrier Act of 1697, in this country the Royal Supremacy, acts as a check upon hasty and ill-considered change. More decisive, however, than the positive restraints imposed by the wisdom of the legislator, either on the zeal of the reformer or the stubborn non possumus of the obstructive, is the mysterious instinct which guides the life of 1 "Life of Principal Rainy,” P. Carnegie Simpson, D.D., ii, 438. mankind in accordance with an ever-widening purpose to a distant but an assured goal. The society of the future, economists tell us, will differ widely from that of the present. The same may be said, and with equal certainty, of its religion. The simultaneous movement of thought in all the Churches, and its substantial identity under a variety of surroundings, are as calculated to excite the attention of the observer as were the signs which announced the shattering of the imposing fabric of European society which took place more than a century ago. And we may apply to the former the words used by Burke of the latter-the wisest perhaps that he ever wrote of the great event in question: 'If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate." 1 1 66 Thoughts on French Affairs." |