I am convinced that the debt which England and the world owe to the Anglican Reformers of the sixteenth century, has never been properly appreciated. Like the air which we breathe, but do not perceive, the spirit with which they have invested the religion of England, is that of life and health. They banished nothing but the fogs and noxious exhalations of the middle ages; and, as the result, we find England hale and hearty, and bearing more fruit in her age, while the churches which allowed the Tridentine vapours to become their atmosphere, are perishing in the agues and fevers of a long and ghastly decline. Look at Spain and Italy!
And I cannot forbear, in conclusion, to remark, that when American travellers go to England, and copy the false statistics of some infidel almanac, to justify their railings against the National Church, they are about as wise as John Bull is, when he takes the statistics of our (immigrant) pauperism and crime, as a test of the true state of American society. It is true that there are great abuses connected with the establishment; and it is also true that they are deplored by no class of Englishmen, half so much as they are by the true churchman. If the Church could be left to herself, they would be immediately reformed; but the very creatures who rail at her, because of them, are they who refuse to give her the freedom which she claims, and who do the most to enslave her to the State power. I am no friend to that power in the Church of God; but they who prate against the church, because of her misfortunes, deserve the rebuke of all thinking men, whose knowledge of history, and of the existing state of the world, enables them to compare what has been done for England, by that church, even in her fetters, with what all other religions put together have done for the residue of the world. When we reflect upon the three great achievements of that Church for English liberty—the Reformation, the Restoration of the Constitution and Monarchy, and the repudiation of the Popish Stuarts, we may well afford to laugh at such sneers as a Macaulay endeavours to raise against her, on the ground of blemishes with which his own reckless and treacherous political allies have deformed and afflicted her. And when we attempt to estimate the blessings she has diffused through the whole Anglo-Saxon people, and by them through the world, who can refrain from blessing the dear Church which has placed the English Bible in every cottage, and which, for three centuries, has read the Ten Commandments, every Lord’s day, in the ears of millions of the people? It is only when we think of what that Church has done, in spite of the golden chains which fetter her, and in spite of the political miscreants who have always hung like hounds upon her heels and hands, that we can rightly estimate her strong vitality, and her vast beneficence.
And let it be remembered, too, that all that is good among English dissenters, is sucked from the Church, as the parasite derives its nourishment from the oak. The dissenters are mainly the small-tradesmen of England, a people intelligent enough to perceive the faults of their hereditary religion, but not generally enlightened enough to know its value and its services to themselves. They are like the Dutch boors, who thought the sun did no good among the Flemings, because they saw it so seldom, and who concluded that daylight came from the clouds, which were always visible. Whoever will take the pains to contrast the dissenters of England with those of Germany, will learn how much even they derive from the Church, against which they so ignorantly rail.
I desire to speak with great respect of many of the dissenters of England, who, like their estimable Doddridge, are such by the force of circumstances only, while they love and revere the Church of the nation; but I have known even American Presbyterians to experience the greatest revulsion of feeling against the mass of English dissenters, after actual contact with their coarse and semi-political religionism. I was not less surprised than gratified, moreover, to observe very lately, in a widely circulated American newspaper, edited by eminent Presbyterians, a full vindication of the Church of England from the odious and false views current among us in America, with respect to the system of tithes. The writer was himself an English or Irish dissenter, and he frankly asserted the fact, that in paying his tithes, he suffered no wrong, and contributed nothing to the establishment, which did not belong to her. “In short,” said he, “the Church owns one-tenth of my rent, and I am quite as willing to pay it to her, as to pay the nine-tenths to my other landlord.” The nine-tenths might go to a popish priest; but does he who pays it contribute to uphold Popery? No more than one who hires his house of a play-actor, supports the stage.
But although the decline of dissent, in England, is universally admitted, it is generally imagined that Popery is growing. So it is if the immigration from Ireland, of thousands of navvies, who have built Romish chapels and convents, out of their earnings on the railways, be the basis of the remark. But nothing was ever more over-rated than the late Apostacy, which is the fruit of a mere personal influence, over a few young men at Oxford, gained by one brilliant sophist, and perniciously directed by him towards ultramontane Romanism. It has spent itself already in a spasmodic revolt against common sense, which is breeding a reaction towards rationalism: but the Church of England is as much in danger from Irvingism as from Newmanism; and Wesleyanism was vastly more energetic against her than either. The chagrin and disappointment of Mr. Newman himself is most apparent. After numbering the “educated men” whom he had involved in his own downfall as a hundred, he confesses that their defection from the Church has scarcely been felt by her. “The huge creature from which they went forth,” he says, “showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself, and went about its work as of old time.” Yes, but with a newer and mightier energy than ever before, and that in both hemispheres. The unhappy man seems to have imagined that by getting into a balloon, he could kick the earth from its orbit: but the planet still revolves around the sun, while he dangles in the air, lost in the brilliant clouds of his own imaginations, and fancying his petty elevation as sublime as her pathway through the skies.
In the same manner, the Dublin reviewers are continually deploring their powerless expenditure of vast resources against the religion of England, which stands in its fortress of Scriptural truth, more impregnable than Gibraltar. Let the reader reflect, for a minute, on the essential characteristic of the Anglican Reformation, as it began under Wycliff, in a translation of the Scriptures, and then weigh the importance of the following citation from a Romish periodical.
“Who will not say,” says the Dublin Review, “that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country. It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of the church-bell, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the gifts and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him forever out of the English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land, there is not a Protestant with one spark of righteousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”
Action and reaction are always equal; and it is my own opinion that the hand of God is visible in the permission of the late scandals, and their sequel will demonstrate that He has been infusing into modern Romanism a spirit which will blow it to atoms. Among the beardless boys, who have swelled the numerical strength of the apostacy, there are some prodigals who will yet come to themselves, and remember their father’s house with penitent tears: and as to their leaders, the ex-Jesuit Steinmetz in his narrative of a residence at Stoneyhurst, introduces the following striking view of the case, which sustains my own impressions. “Though the men of Rome,” he says, “exult in this reaction (as they call it) which is making Oscott a refugium peccatorum, perhaps from among the very men whose captive chains clank in their triumphal thanksgiving, there will be shot the lethalis arundo, the deadly arrow that will pierce and cling to the side of their mother church in the appointed time. It is not children that they are receiving; but full-grown men, accustomed most pertinaciously to think for themselves. They began with being reformers, and it must be confessed with some of the boldness of reformers. Will they be content to change their skins? To become sheep, from having been, as it were, wolves? To smother the cunning and the clever thought, which seems so flattering to one’s own vanity, in the cold, dead ashes of papal infallibility? We shall see.” This is reasonable, and consoling. We may not live to see it; but a rebellion against Truth must have its rebound, and Church and State will be stronger for such rebellions in the end.
If then, the decline of English arts and arms be near, of which I am by no means as confident as some, it will be a very slow decline, and coincident with a new glory, and a brighter one, than England yet has known. Instead of armies, she is now sending forth soldiers of the Prince of Peace. She has discovered that it is cheaper and wiser to sustain missionaries than bayonets. The era of her greatest work is before her. She is to become the nursing mother of nations, and in her language, the sound of the Gospel is to go forth into all lands, and unto the end of the world. Hers is the deposit of the faith once delivered to the saints. The Roman Churches have divorced themselves from the promises, and in the Catholicity of England chiefly is fulfilled the promise of Christ, to be always with His own Apostolic commission, even to the end of the world. At the same time, there is a moral life in English society, which must long salt the State, and preserve it from decay. I appeal to the common sense of Christian men, and I ask, in what other country under heaven is there such a mass of domestic and social purity? Where else is there so large a benevolence, so masculine a religion, so enlightened a conscience, among any people? England has her shame as well as her glory; she is part and parcel of a sinful world; but her light is not hid under a bushel: and if the hope of the world be not in her candle, I am at a loss to know where to find encouragement as a Christian, that the Gospel is to become universal. I believe, indeed, that my own country is to share, with her, this magnificent career of peaceful conquest. We are bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh: but I believe, also, that before we can heal the nations, we must first heal ourselves of the wretched religious anarchy which is the bane of our education, our society, and our National character.
After lingering for a few days in the society of my friends, in London and Oxford, I was, once more, for a short time, the guest of the friend to whom this memorial is inscribed, and met at his table, again, the venerable Vicar, who was one of the first to welcome me to England. To part with such friends, and their families, perhaps forever, was only to become aware how deeply I had entwined with theirs, my brotherly feelings and Christian regards. But I had been long enough enjoying myself amid the scenes and friendships which even our holy religion, while it alone can produce them, forbids to our self-indulgence, in a world where every Christian is called to the work of a missionary. Much as I longed to mingle in the delights of an English Christmas, I felt the call of duty, and the blessedness of giving as greater than that of receiving. My own parishioners expected to see me at the altar, on the approaching feast, and my heart warmed towards them, as deserving my best endeavours to gratify their reasonable wishes. Thanks, under God, to the good steamer Baltic, and its skillful commander, I escaped the perils of a wintry sea, and on Christmas-eve, was restored to my flock, and family, in Hartford. On the following day, as I celebrated the Holy Eucharist, I trust it was not without befitting gratitude to God, nor without a new and profound sense of the blessings we owe to him, whose Gospel is the spirit of “peace on earth, and of good-will to men.”