THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW

N° XLV. OCTOBER 1886.

ART. I.-EXPANSION OR DISRUPTION?

The Expansion of the Church of England. By the Rev. SIR GEORGE W. Cox, Bart., and JAMES MARTINEAU, LL.D. Contemporary Review, June and July. (London, 1886.)

THE literary skill and dialectical ability with which the programme of the Church Reform Union has been first stated by Sir George W. Cox, and then advocated by Dr. Martineau, in the Contemporary Review, may very readily prevent many of their readers from noting the real questions at issue, and from perceiving the overwhelming force of the objections to the scheme. Those objections come under the two heads of practice and theory, and may be tersely summed up in the general rejoinder that the scheme is intrinsically unworkable, and eminently undesirable, even if it could by any possibility be carried out.

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The phrase which serves as the motto or badge of the Church Reform Union is this: To make the Church of England co-extensive with the whole Christian thought and life of the nation.' This has a fine dignified sound, and seems as though it shadowed out a noble idea, not impossible of realisation. But when tested in the dry light of reason, to the exclusion of the refrangible rays from the lenses of rhetoric and sentiment, it proves to be merely one of the sonorous nullities which habitually impose on fresh generations of constitution-mongers in politics and religion alike. Precisely as with the Socialist and the anarchist revolutionists of the present day, the advocates of the new scheme for reconstructing the Church of England leave the persistent facts of human nature, and the accumulated experience of history, VOL. XXIII.—NO. XLV.

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entirely out of their reckoning, and travel cheerfully on that high a priori road which leads nowhither in particular.

For consider what are the means by which they propose to compass their desired end. The whole plan is reducible to two main factors: abolition of every subscription to formularies, with all penalties for deviation from those formularies in doctrine or practice; and enrolment of all existing Christian sects and communions in England as henceforward integral parts of the Church of England, while each retaining their own polity, tenets, and methods of worship unchanged, so that their ministers shall be legally competent to conduct what services they please in the parish churches, and be eligible to hold benefices, dignities, and the episcopate also in the Church, without, so to speak, paying any consideration for the privilege. It is needless to do more than briefly draw attention to the close analogy this proposal bears to the programme of the political anarchists, who postulate a clean sweep of all laws, and the fullest recognition of individualism in politics, as the necessary prerequisites of social regeneration. Every objection, abstract or practical, which lies against the one applies equally to the other. And herein may be detected the fallacy underlying Dr. Martineau's eloquent indictment of Uniformity, because every argument he has marshalled against that principle-which he has not distinguished in its use from its abuse-can be urged, and is urged, with but slight change of phrase, against all existing codes of law and systems of executive in the civil order, for which it is proposed to substitute certain abstract humanitarian maxims, which it is assumed will at once begin to operate effectively, smoothly, and beneficially, unhindered by any of those volcanic forces underlying society which are the cause and the justification of all penal and repressive enact

ments.

But this preliminary flaw in the scheme may be thought too technical to be fairly pressed, and it is thus necessary to point out others which cannot be denied or minimized. It is clear, then, that the proposed measure, if to be brought out of the mere paper stage at all, must be shaped and sanctioned in one of three ways: (1) as the concurrent act of the civil legislature and the accredited representatives of the several communions concerned; (2) as a simple enabling statute, to authorise all societies which choose to federate themselves with the Church of England on their own terms to do so, while obliging the Church to make no conditions upon its part; (3) as a compulsory statute, of exclusively civil origin,

suppressing the independent existence of the various voluntary societies, and obliging them to register themselves as integral portions of the Church of England. But none of the three is conceivably feasible. Take the first, which is the most temperate and equitable of them, and it will at once be evident to all who have even a rudimentary notion of the problem that it is impossible so much as to imagine the Roman Catholic body in this country assenting to any plan of the kind, which is subversive of its fundamental principles. It is not likely that the Plymouth Brethren who, though at the very poles of opposition to Roman Catholics on all questions of polity and system, are like them in their rigid exclusiveness, would be more pliant, and thus at least a million and a half of English denizens in the one case, and several thousands in the other, are at once shut out by their own act from the operation of the scheme. Therewith the keystone of the entire structure falls, for with the failure to include the whole religious life and thought of Christian England, involved in the certain abstention of these societies, the symmetry, nay, the very raison d'être, of the proposed measure is gone; for it is to be carefully remembered that no mere partial expansion in the direction indicated is so much. as hinted at by the two writers who champion it. They are clear-sighted enough to see that the justification of so sweeping a proposal must be sought in the width of its scope, that the price would be too high to be willingly paid for only slight increase of comprehensiveness in the Church, for mere trifling adhesions from without.

Further, some of the most important Nonconformist communions are based on the principle of congregational autonomy; with the result that no person or group of persons has the right or power to speak for the society as a whole; no assembly or delegation can legislate for it; no conclusions arrived at by the numerical majority, however large, can bind it. This holds good of the Congregationalists; in a less degree, but almost equally, of the Baptists; and indeed, also of Dr. Martineau's own society, the Unitarians. And, consequently, the first of the three methods enumerated above as those whereby the scheme must be made operative, if at all, is inapplicable to these three denominations, and to all others of kindred polity, because they have no machinery whereby they could take concurrent action and signify their assent in corporate fashion; while if only a stray congregation or meeting here and there came into the scheme, the aim of

its devisers would be defeated. Concurrent action civil power and the various religious societies in the must therefore be dismissed as impracticable.

Take the second mode, that of a simple enabling leaving the sects free to act, but restraining the Chur any counter-action, in the matter of federation; and t difficulties at once present themselves. Since the 'di of Dissent' is such that societies which are most clos to each other in organization, doctrine, and polity, whi a hundred obvious and excellent reasons for unitingthe three leading Presbyterian denominations in S and the principal Methodist sects in this country-n less exhibit no tendency to combine, but rather to into ever new subdivisions, what is the probability in of their reversing this attitude of mind in relation to a such as the Church of England, which has hitherto p marked differences from their traditional ideas and and with which they have been more or less openly And even without taking such considerations into there is one of such an obvious nature that only the blindness with which the votaries of a fad are co affected can explain its disregard by the Church Union. It is this: that the main hostility of Engli senters, for some generations past, has been directed the notion of a State Church, against the intrusion civil power, as such, into the sphere of religion. On cardinal points which the Nonconformists of the seve century put forward as their reasons for dissenting f Church of England-namely, their subjectivity in wors their Calvinism in doctrine-their modern descendan virtually admitted that their forefathers were in the for they have copied many of the liturgical method Church, and Calvinism is well-nigh dead, even amor societies which, not content with accepting the West Confession, adopt the name of Calvinistic; but the chosen instead a ground of dissent which a Puritan of well's day could not have so much as understood. the newly constituted Church of England would be, i of the civil statute embodying the programme of the Reform Union, more emphatically the creation and dency of the State than the most impassioned Libe supposes it to be as it now is, this hostility would portionably increased, and with it the reluctance of Nonconformists to identify themselves in any fashi such an institution. And thus the enabling statute