momentary attention, to say nothing of that universal assent and adhesion which are essential to the theory of 'expansion as formulated in the programme. Thus, the utility of the second half of the Church Reform Union programme is not so made out as to justify action to make it operative.

A third count of the indictment has yet to be adduced, that the scheme is not only unworkable and useless, but actively mischievous also. Ostensibly intended to promote the efficiency of the Church of England as a great national institution, and to narrow the area of religious controversy, it would inevitably result in the sore injury, if not even the destruction, of the first, and the indefinite extension and embitterment of the second. Dr. Martineau has frankly admitted and even emphasized what his colleague on this occasion has, in common with most of his school, passed very lightly over, namely, that all the proposed changes, so far as they touch the relations of Church and Dissent, are entirely in favour of the latter, which is to get all and give nothing in return. It is true that Dr. Martineau defends this on the ground that the Church is merely being made to pay a penalty righteously incurred by acts of injustice towards Nonconformists in the past, and that, after all, Churchmen will be little affected by the surrender of usurped privileges and the dilution of monopolized citizenship. But his admission that the wishes and interests of the society which includes the larger part of the nation, being not only far greater than any of its competitors singly, but than all collectively, are to be systematically set aside, must be taken as quite disproving the assertions of the Church Reform Union that it is aiming at the advantage of the Church in its proposals. The case is not in the least like the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which many excellent Churchmen sixty years ago thought was the pulling down of Church bulwarks, but which none would desire to see re-enacted now. For the abolition of those Acts did not touch the internal affairs of Churchmen at all, but merely removed an invidious civil disability imposed on Nonconformists, involving, too, constant profanation of the most sacred of Christian rites. Yet the evil to be apprehended from this part of the scheme is less serious than that which would result from the abolition of all doctrinal tests and liturgical standards. It is natural that Dr. Martineau should be the warm opponent of subscription, because the traditional attitude of the Unitarian body has been one of hostility to creeds and formularies, as inimical to intellectual freedom. But there is a singular inconsistency discoverable in his strictures, surprising

in so distinguished and acute a thinker, which goes far to nullify his entire argument, and to suggest that he has been unconsciously biassed by the idola tribus. He has pointed out, in his usual felicitous diction, that each truly Christian society or communion has its own peculiar merits and virtues, along with its own special theology, and therefore that as the like fruits are produced by various theologies, 'they must be nourished by the aliment which is common to all, not by that which is special to any, and that the mistake of each Church is not in what it selects for its own love, but in its disparagement of others for selecting something else for theirs.' That is to say, more briefly, the ideal Church is that which has the fullest creed, which employs the fewest negations. Yet when Dr. Martineau turns from the abstract to the concrete, his charge against the working of subscription in the Church of England is, not that it shuts out certain doctrines, but that it includes some which he regards as false, and desires to see discarded, specifically the Athanasian Creed and the tenet of absolution. It is that these may be denied with impunity in the Church of England, not that some positive tenet which is seen to operate healthily elsewhere may be imported into its teaching, that he lends his aid to the present agitation. That is, he shows that a polemical object, hitherto unavowed, and kept carefully in the background by the members of the Church Reform Union, is bound up with their scheme, if it be not its essential feature; he argues on the side of that very attitude of negation which he had just before so vigorously censured; and he makes against the cause of intellectual freedom, by falling into the fallacy-here comes in an idolum tribus again-of assuming that it can be legitimately exercised only in the refusal to believe, not in candid receptivity towards new credenda. That is but a one-sided and mutilated freedom, hardly worth living or dying for. 'Der Geist der stets verneint,' is not the Spirit of Liberty. It was not the mere negation of classical paganism which nerved the ancient martyrs to face the rack and the arena, for tens of thousands amongst the educated classes of their time believed in the gods of Olympus as little as they it was their positive faith that made them spiritually free and courageous. Yet again, there is a misconception which might have been thought antecedently impossible to one with Dr. Martineau's frequent breadth and sympathy of view, in that he brings up the coexistence of the three schools, High, Low, and Broad, within the Church of England, as a proof that subscription has failed ignominiously to do its intended work, and has

rather produced a crop of intolerable scandals. Surely the truth is that the differences between these three schools, in temperament and in the practical action which is born of temperament, are not peculiar to the Church of England, but belong to permanent facts of human nature, everywhere and at all times that a sufficient degree of intellectual development has been attained to allow of the apprehension of spiritual ideas; and that must be the truest Church which most readily and cheerfully finds room, work, and sympathy for all of them. It is thus matter of reasonable pride, and in no sense of humiliation, to the Anglican Churchman that his communion alone, perhaps, in the world, could have included simultaneously three such unlike types as Simeon, Maurice, and Pusey. And the remark may be just interjected that this fact also proves that no serious burden is imposed by subscription upon any who honestly believe in a supernatural Christianity. Now, if the competing Christian societies be interrogated on this head, none of them will stand the test. The Roman Catholic Church, which has developed the High Church side of Christianity more than any other communion, expelled its Low Churchmen, the Jansenists, more than a century ago, and in our own day has silenced its Broad Churchmen, by condemning Hermes and Gunther, so that those of its members who belong by ineradicable temperament to either of these schools must either eat their hearts out in forced silence or secede. The Unitarians have no room in their body for any but Broad Churchmen, their lack of a historical creed being enough to repel High Church souls, their cold intellectualism an equal deterrent to the emotional Evangelical. Indeed the Unitarian system, with which Dr. Martineau is associated, and which owes to that association its chief, if not its only, claim to attention in England, has no positive elements of its own which would enrich the Church by being brought into its treasury. The pure mora

1 It may be quite frankly admitted that this tolerance of the Church has been occasionally abused by individual clergymen, who have carried freedom in the interpretation of the formularies beyond all reasonable limits in one or other direction. But so far as this holds good, it is no more than would happen still under the laxest system which could be devised, and the remedy which would occur to any practical mind not pledged to a foregone conclusion is that of stricter discipline, not of laxer obligation. In any case, one fact is manifest, that the seriousness of the divergence in question has very much abated of late years, that the sense of unity and fellowship in the same Church, with the same body of positive doctrine, has much increased under the stress of modern controversies, instead of the breaches widening visibly, as must have been the case had Dr. Martineau's criticism upon the value of subscription been accurate. VOL. XXIII.-NO. XLV.

C

lity and the love of intellectual freedom to which its adherents not unjustly lay claim, are in no sense peculiar to it, nor less esteemed in the Church; and being the true child of the unspiritual eighteenth century, chilly, respectable, and priggish, (precisely the faults which were nearly fatal to the Church), it has nothing to teach the latter in creed, ethics, polity, or worship. What is even more to the point, it has never been able, in all the centuries since its main positions were first advocated by the Ebionists, by Artemon, and by Photinus, to exercise appreciable influence on the main current of Christian life and thought. It has had no such vogue and acceptance as Arianism enjoyed for a time, it has hardly ever risen to the dimensions of a sect, as distinguished from a mere clique; for even the Socinians, who held their ground for about a hundred years in Poland and Transylvania, had more in common with the Catholic creeds, and yet achieved no permanent success; and the fall of Calvinism in New England has been followed by the disintegration of the Unitarianism which began as a protest against it, so that the Western Unitarian Conference' in America has recently struck the words 'Christianity' and 'God' out of its programme, as connoting ideas not compatible with true Unitarian breadth and freedom. It is obvious, then, without entering at all on the question of theological orthodoxy, which is foreign to the immediate inquiry, concerned only with plans for widening the basis and extending the influence of the Church of England, that to assimilate the Church to Unitarianism would be merely to narrow it in creed, in spirit, and in sympathy; to make it the home of a clique rather than of a nation, to link it with unbroken failure, to dissociate it from the whole Christian past. And there is this too which needs to be taken into account: that a dispassionate examination of two modern non-Christian systems, that of the Reformed Jews who have abandoned the ceremonial law and cease to look for a Messiah, but who fully admit the purity and dignity of Christian ethics; and that of the original form of the Brahmo-Somaj, as shaped by Rammohun Roy, will show that Unitarianism, even in England, has much more in common with them than with historical Christianity, especially as manifested in the Church of England, so that even Dr. Martineau, when he is adopting the language of his sect, and not using his own, speaks 'half in the speech of Ashdod.' The dividing lines are faint and brief on the one side, they are long and well defined on the other; and thus logical inference and even-handed justice would require that the dim ones should

not be suffered to remain after the conspicuous ones had been effaced, but that equal footing should be found within the reconstructed Church for societies laying no claim to the title of Christian, but alleging merely their moral character and the English domicile of their adherents as their qualification for the franchise. There is, in truth, no logical pause between the admission to copartnership of so honoured a thinker as Dr. Martineau and that of the shrill and shrewish Freethought lecturer in petticoats.'

There are some few of the sects which can welcome both Low and Broad, but most can satisfy none but the former, and there is not one amongst them all, with the doubtful exception of the vanishing Irvingites, where the High Church temper can find a congenial home. And these results are in every case practically independent of the question of subscription or no subscription in the several bodies; whence the conclusion is that the Church of England is more truly broad and liberal than any of them, even when they make their boast of pre-eminence in these very qualities. It may be observed here that Dr. Martineau has made a historical mistake in assuming that subscription, whenever enforced in the Church of England, was intended to exclude rigidly all but one type of theological opinion. On the contrary, the intention all along was comprehension: under Edward VI., to unite the men of the Old and of the New learning; under Elizabeth, to find a common term for Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Puritans; at the Restoration, to retain as many as possible of the intruded pastors on the easiest terms consistent with preventing a return to the state of things under the Commonwealth, when episcopacy was abolished, the Primate judicially murdered, seven thousand clergymen driven from their cures and benefices, and the use of the Prayer Book, even for private devotion, made penal, with fines for the two first offences against the law and a year's imprisonment for the third: a set of facts usually left out of sight by those who lament over the hard measure dealt out to the 'two thousand '---more probably

1 The very interest Dr. Martineau has uniformly exhibited in the spiritual aspects of religion, the keen sense of devotion which may be observed in sundry of his writings, make it reasonable to ask him what probability there is that the religious sentiment would survive if, per impossibile, the programme which he advocates could be carried out; for with the disappearance of a definite creed and a positive worship nothing would remain to foster it or give it scope for exercise; while the broad teaching of experience is that the school which alone would be advantaged by the scheme has always been signally deficient in this particular quality, and has never failed to debilitate it, well nigh to paralysis, whenever it has become dominant within the Church.