No

of something which she has never yet been | State, reminded at every step of those numwithout, which all the aggregate of sects berless large and rich traditions, of those cannot give, which vast numbers, to say the numberless appeals-often silent and obscure least, of Englishmen, high and low, regard ones, but not therefore the less powerful— as the most precious religious advantage-an to our reason as well as to our hearts, which inherited, open, public Church. gather round that which has lasted for long and embraced the most varied elements and the strangest fortunes in the many ages of an eventful history; the idea of a religious organization, joined by continuity of corporate life with the past yet in full harmony with the present, old and solid yet able to grow and change, which has seen many things and been tried by them, deep enough and flexible enough in its genius to interest and attract widely, large enough for minds to have free breathing-room and range, open for all to benefit by, and for all to see. doubt there are minds which do not value this; who do not care for an outward embodiment of religion which reflects the attributes and characters which a good citizen values in the State-its comprehensiveness, its natural and necessary breadth, its dependence on what has gone before; its longdrawn history, its accumulated memories, its usages framed by time rather than by the direct purpose of man, its mixture of strict enactment with wide margins, its practical indulgence and looseness of outline, its inherited temper of moderation and forbearance and habits of making allowance. The Church, like the State, is something which a man feels to belong to him very closely, yet not as his family belongs to him, or his club, or his joint-stock company; and there may be many good and religious people who do not care for a religious fellowship, about which so many others besides themselves, and of such opposite views and tempers, have so much to say, and which has been moulded by those who have been before us in the world, even more than by the generation of to-day or yesterday. Let such men have the most ample liberty for following religion in their own way. They have something to say for themselves, and nothing but the influences of time and reason-slow influences perhaps-ought to be hoped for, to interfere with them and control them. But if there is another way of religion in England, not now proposed for the first time to be set up against them, but existing, of immemorial date, firmly rooted, bringing forth abundant fruit, filling the land with its monuments of holy beauty, and the literature of the nation with writings of consecrated genius, why should it be proscribed and put an end to? Why should the occasion be denied to those who prize it, of feeling that their religion is not one of their own selection and framing, but that it has

There are things, we have said, belonging to the Church as a public organization, which the Nonconformist bodies cannot have; and these are things which impress a man like Mr. Arnold, who is not inclined to take a strong side for or against, in the theological questions between the Church and its as sailants. The Church, to begin with, has its part, which nothing else shares with it, in the history of the nation: has not only influenced this history strongly, for that may be said of other religious bodies; but has gone along with it, side by side, in all kinds of ways, inextricably woven in with it. The triumph of Nonconformity may take many things from the Church, but this it cannot take, any more than it can itself supply it: the fact that up to this time the Church, with all its changes, has lived from first to last with the life of the English nation, and that, beyond this, it holds, by real links of historical fact and spiritual kindred, to that great Christian body whose beginnings go back to the first ages and whose limits comprehended kingdoms and empires. The enthusiasm of Mr. Miall and Mr. Jacob Bright for self-assertion and disagreement for the dissidence of Dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion' may finish by putting an end to this; but let it be observed what they would be doing. Nothing, by which they could be any gainers: their religious organizations would be as free and unimpeded as they are now, but not a bit more so. But, for a number of their countrymen, they would have destroyed a great idea realized for ages in unbroken fact the idea of a historic, inherited Church, which was the Church of their fathers, as it was of those from whom their fathers learned the religion of Christ; the idea of a communion, not set on foot and self-constituted, like a religious order or a charitable association, by the piety or reforming zeal and on the responsibility of certain private Christians, but one which could not help existing,' which existed in virtue of certain great general influences and certain great events of universal interest, their natural, spontaneous, uninterrupted consequence; the idea of a society in which a man found himself, just as he found himself in the State, surrounded by all the associations, venerable, inspiring, subduing, elevating, even saddening, which give grandeur and ennobling force to the thought of the

come down, a public gift and inheritance, | representative and common, compared with for the great people to which they belong? that of her great parties, is, as a whole, Why should they be deprived of that large anxious after large and comprehensive ideas room in which their feet are set,' of being of religion; very definite, indeed, in its view able to feel that they have a part in what is of facts and outlines, but forbearing to the common possession of their brethren as theorize about them and distrustful of dogit was of their fathers, of that sense both of matic confidence and refinement; impatient wider liberty and larger sympathies which of absolute and aggressive pretensions, and goes with what is ancient and is not limited fighting vigorously when it is necessary to by private and personal aims and rules? fight, but turning away by preference from Why should they be forbidden their ancient the fine questions of the schools and the neand familiar connection with the fulness and gations of controversy, to dwell in its own richness of national life and universal Chris- way-with greater love for what is real than tian thought, because there are others who care for method and completeness, with like better the more jealous fences and closer want, perhaps, of scientific ardour, but atmosphere of a particular association ? honestly and with good sense-on the great broad aspects of religion, and their bearing on the conduct and prospects of man. There has always been, what to the eyes of strong religionists seemed a want of definiteness in dogma, a want of spirituality and unction, a taint of mere morality; what to those who look wider than party, has seemed a supreme interest in real goodness and righteousness, a severe, solemn, most earnest subordination of every other aspect of religion to this one. And this view has commended itself most to that better side of English nature which lays so much stress on veracity and self-control, on fear of self-deceit and aversion to high professions.

This distinction, that the Church, as compared with its rivals, is an ancient, historic, continuous body, though it has much to do with what is of the greatest importance in human concerns, namely, feeling and sentiment, carries with it much more than sentiment. It is closely connected with another feature in the contrast, which Mr. Arnold has brought out in its various lights with great keenness and power; the character of Church doctrine and religion. It is a feature which, it must be said, is to many a subject of the deepest scorn and insulting sarcasm, as it is to others a source of the deepest satisfaction and comfort. It is the marked preference of the genius of the Church of England for uncontroversial religion and a not too definite theology. We can hear reclamations on all sides against such a statement; we have at once recalled against us her controversial formularies, lists of her great polemics, enumerations of her sharply divided and excited parties. But is it not so? Contrast her divinity with the infinite and systematic elaborateness of the great Roman theologians, pursuing, adjudicating on every point, and with the lofty, often noble, ambitions of the great Roman spiritual masters. Contrast her literature with the great master-pieces of the Puritan divines, whether in the province of doctrine or the religious life. All the world is well aware of the existence in English Church literature of that which people who value it call sobriety and modesty of statement, calm, proportionate, temperately serious views of divine things, a shyness to go too far and to speak too positively; and which those who do not like it call tameness, vacillation, vagueness, feebleness of theological instinct and genius, cowardice, dryness, deadness to the Gospel; or sneer at as a spiritless affectation of a homely and unpretending piety. But the result is that what is eminently Church of England divinity, and which is accepted generally as

There can be no doubt that if the Church had done what the Puritans ever since the days of Elizabeth have been wanting her to do, and what she has so obstinately resisted, to break distinctly and formally with her past, this, whether it be good or evil, would have been different. Their policy has always been to make this great break and fresh start; we see in Hooker's controversy with Travers, how even a good man like Travers was driven by the inevitable tendencies of his system, to regard all his countrymen who had lived before him as outsiders and fatally wrong, and how hardly even Hooker could withstand and qualify the assumptions which the Puritans were trying to make popular. Led astray in the first instance by the sad necessities of the times, Puritanism made the theological oppositions and warfare of a fiercely militant Protestantism take the place of the substantial, and calm and varied ideas of Christianity; and because the Church would not break utterly with its past, it broke with the Church. When the Church, not excluding, at different periods of her history, much of what the Puritans insisted on, yet aimed in the long run at a larger, less contentious, more universally intelligible view of religion, the Puritans threw themselves. on two or three great theological ideas, formulated

So

a polity of their own for the very purpose of giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position whenever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal for which they have constituted their separate existence, is unsound. predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism and Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or historic Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity with the task of developing the immense and complex store of ideas contained in Christianity; and when the stage of development has been reached at which the unsoundness of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and her task will remain what they were before.

'And even if it were true, as they allege, that the national and historic Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to Puritanism, and not to the historic Churches, that in showing the invalidity and unscripturalness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because the Puritan churches found their very existence on it, and the historic Churches do not. And not founding their existence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic Churches have a collective life which is very considerable, and power of growth, even in respect of the very scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which would be yet greater and more fruitful still, if the historic Church combined the large and admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces.' -pp. 1-8.

The effect of this original false conception and mistaken direction in the first start of Nonconformity Mr. Arnold has illustrated with unexpected effects from the history of the early dealings between the Church and the Puritans. The popular notion is that it was all tyrannous enforcing of arbitrary forms and usages on one side; all brave and single-hearted assertion of freedom of conscience and worship on the other. It is the great boast of the Nonconformists that the Nonconformity of England, and the Nonconformity alone, has been the salvation of England from Papal tyranny and kingly misrule and despotism.' Those who have eyes to see, and have looked into the details of history in those days, know that it was something very different: that if it was a quarrel in which tyranny came in, at least it was a struggle between rival ambitions to tyrannize; that if it was a quarrel in which the hatred of usurpation and love of reasonable freedom came in, that hatred and that love were as strong in those who resisted the Puritans as in any of the Puritans themselves. Mr. Arnold has had the candour and the courage to go against the prevailing sen

timent among Liberal writers, even the more temperate and large-minded among them, who deal with the rival religious tendencies which met at the Hampton Court Conference and the Savoy.

'The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised in the following essay at such length are the doctrines of predestination and justification. Of the aggressive and militant Puritanism of our people, predestination has, almost up to the present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; it was the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan ministers powerfully preached, and called others carnal gospellers for not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline; Puritanism's first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the one and the other in the Church of England, and it became nonconforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that the High Church divines of the seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church of England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is, as we have said, an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of what is shocking to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, and what is eminently worthy of remark, is the constant pressure applied by Puritanism upon the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to this doctrine; the constant resistance-offered by the Church of England, and the large degree in which nonconformity is really due to this cause.

'Everybody knows how far nonconformity is due to the Church of England's rigour in imposing an explicit declaration of adherence to her formularies. But only a few, who have searched out the matter, know how far nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's invincible reluctance to narrow her large

and loose formularies to the strict Calvinistic sense dear to Puritanism. Yet this is what

the record of conferences shows at least as signally as it shows the domineering spirit of the High Church clergy; but our current political histories, written always with an antiecclesiastical bias, which is natural enough, inasmuch as the Church party was not the out of sight. Yet there is a very catena of party of civil liberty, leave this singularly testimonies to prove it; to show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles II.'s, Calvinism, as a power both within and without the Church of England, trying to get decisive command of her formularies; and the Church of England, with the instinct of a body meant to live and grow, and averse to fetter or to engage its future, steadily resisting.'-pp. 8-10.

The phenomenon is as true and important as Mr. Arnold's appreciation of it is clear and forcibly presented. In the original narrowness of their theological and political bases the Nonconformist churches are at a disadvantage, which they can never retrieve,