The History of Freedom, and Other Essays

by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton

The Russian Church is dumb; the congregation does not sing, the priest does not preach. The people have no prayer-books, and are therefore confined to the narrow circle of their own religious ideas. Against the cloud of superstition which naturally gathers in a religion of ceremonies, destitute of the means of keeping alive or cultivating the religious sentiments of the people, there is no resource. In spite of the degeneracy of their clergy, which they are unable to feel, the Russians cling with patriotic affection to their Church, and identify its progress and prosperity with the increase of their empire. As it is an exclusively national institution, every war may become a war of religion, and it is the attachment to the Church which creates the longing and the claim to possess the city from which it came. From the Church the empire derives its tendency to expand, and the Czar the hopes of that universal dominion which was promised to him by the Synod of Moscow in 1619, and for which a prayer was then appointed. The schismatical clergy of Eastern Europe are the channel of Russian influence, the pioneers of Russian aggression. The political dependence of the Church corresponds to its political influence; subserviency is the condition of the power it possesses. The certificate of Easter confession and communion is required for every civil act, and is consequently an object of traffic. In like manner, the confessor is bound to betray to the police all the secrets of confession which affect the interest of the Government. In this deplorable state of corruption, servitude, and decay within, and of threatening hostility to Christian civilisation abroad, the Russian Church pays the penalty of its Byzantine descent.

The Established Church and the sects in England furnish few opportunities of treating points which would be new to our readers. Perhaps the most suggestive portion is the description of the effects of Protestantism on the character and condition of the people. The plunder and oppression of the poor has everywhere followed the plunder of the Church, which was the guardian and refuge of the poor. The charity of the Catholic clergy aimed not merely at relieving, but at preventing poverty. It was their object not only to give alms, but to give to the lower orders the means of obtaining a livelihood. The Reformation at once checked alms-giving; so that, Selden says, in places where twenty pounds a year had been distributed formerly, not a handful of meal was given away in his time, for the wedded clergy could not afford it. The confiscation of the lands where thousands had tilled the soil under the shadow of the monastery or the Church, was followed by a new system of cultivation, which deprived the peasants of their homes. The sheep, men said, were the cause of all the woe; and whole towns were pulled down to make room for them. The prelates of the sixteenth century lament the decline of charity since the Catholic times; and a divine attributed the growing selfishness and harshness to the doctrine of justification by faith. The alteration in the condition of the poor was followed by severe enactments against vagrancy; and the Protestant legislature, after creating a proletariate, treated it as a crime. The conversion of Sunday into a Jewish Sabbath cut off the holiday amusements and soured the cheerfulness of the population. Music, singing, and dancing, the favourite relaxation of a contented people, disappeared, and, especially after the war in the Low Countries, drunkenness began to prevail among a nation which in earlier times had been reckoned the most sober of Northern Europe. The institution which introduced these changes has become a State, not a national Church, whose services are more attended by the rich than by the poor.

After describing the various parties in the Anglican system, the decay of its divinity, and the general aversion to theological research, Döllinger concludes that its dissolution is a question of time. No State Church can long subsist in modern society which professes the religion of the minority. Whilst the want of a definite system of doctrine, allowing every clergyman to be the mouthpiece, not of a church, but of a party, drives an increasing portion of the people to join the sects which have a fixed doctrine and allow less independence to their preachers, the great danger which menaces the Church comes from the State itself. The progress of dissent and of democracy in the legislature will make the Church more and more entirely dependent on the will of the majority, and will drive the best men from the communion of a servile establishment. The rise and fortunes of Methodism are related with peculiar predilection by the author, who speaks of John Wesley as the greatest intellect English Protestantism has produced, next to Baxter.

The first characteristic of Scottish Presbyterianism is the absence of a theology. The only considerable divines that have appeared in Scotland since the Reformation, Leighton and Forbes, were prelates of the Episcopal Church. Calvinism was unable to produce a theological literature, in spite of the influence of English writers, of the example of Holland, and of the great natural intelligence of the Scots. "Their theology," says a distinguished Lutheran divine, "possesses no system of Christian ethics." This Döllinger attributes to the strictness with which they have held to the doctrine of imputation, which is incompatible with any system of moral theology. In other countries it was the same; where that doctrine prevailed, there was no ethical system, and where ethics were cultivated, the doctrine was abandoned. For a century after Luther, no moral theology was written in Germany. The first who attempted it, Calixtus, gave up the Lutheran doctrine. The Dutch historians of Calvinism in the Netherlands record, in like manner, that there the dread of a collision with the dogma silenced the teaching of ethics both in literature and at the universities. Accordingly, all the great Protestant moralists were opposed to the Protestant doctrine of justification. In Scotland the intellectual lethargy of churchmen is not confined to the department of ethics; and Presbyterianism only prolongs its existence by suppressing theological writing, and by concealing the contradictions which would otherwise bring down on the clergy the contempt of their flocks.

Whilst Scotland has clung to the original dogma of Calvin, at the price of complete theological stagnation, the Dutch Church has lost its primitive orthodoxy in the progress of theological learning. Not one of the several schools into which the clergy of the Netherlands are divided has remained faithful to the five articles of the synod of Dortrecht, which still command so extensive an allegiance in Great Britain and America. The conservative party, headed by the statesman and historian, Groen van Prinsterer, who holds fast to the theology which is so closely interwoven with the history of his country and with the fortunes of the reigning house, and who invokes the aid of the secular arm in support of pure Calvinism, is not represented at the universities. For all the Dutch divines know that the system cannot be revived without sacrificing the theological activity by which it has been extinguished. The old confessional writings have lost their authority; and the general synod of 1854 decided that, "as it is impossible to reconcile all opinions and wishes, even in the shortest confession, the Church tolerates divergence from the symbolical books." The only unity, says Groen, consists in this, that all the preachers are paid out of the same fund. The bulk of the clergy are Arminians or Socinians. From the spectacle of the Dutch Church, Dr. Döllinger comes to the following result: first, that without a code of doctrine laid down in authoritative confessions of faith, the Church cannot endure; secondly, that the old confessional writings cannot be maintained, and are universally given up; and thirdly, that it is impossible to draw up new ones.

French Protestantism suffered less from the Revolution than the Catholic Church, and was treated with tenderness, and sometimes with favour. The dissolution of Continental Protestantism began in France. Before their expulsion in 1685, the French divines had cast off the yoke of the Dortrecht articles, and in their exile they afterwards promoted the decline of Calvinism in the Netherlands. The old Calvinistic tradition has never been restored, the works of the early writers are forgotten, no new theological literature has arisen, and the influence of Germany has borne no considerable fruit. The evangelical party, or Methodists, as they are called, are accused by the rest of being the cause of their present melancholy state. The rationalism of the indifférens generally prevails among the clergy, either in the shape of the naturalism of the eighteenth century (Coquerel), or in the more advanced form of modern criticism, as it is carried out by the faculty of Strasburg, with the aid of German infidelity. Payment by the State and hatred of Catholicism are the only common marks of French Protestant divines. They have no doctrine, no discipline, no symbol, no theology. Nobody can define the principle or the limits of their community.

The Calvinism of Switzerland has been ruined in its doctrine by the progress of theology, and in its constitution by the progress of democracy. In Geneva the Church of Calvin fell in the revolutions of 1841 and 1846. The symbolical books are abolished; the doctrine is based on the Bible; but the right of free inquiry is granted to all; the ruling body consists of laymen. "The faith of our fathers," says Merle d'Aubigné, "counts but a small group of adherents amongst us." In the canton of Vaud, where the whole ecclesiastical power was in the hands of the Government, the yoke of the democracy became insupportable, and the excellent writer, Vinet, seceded with 180 ministers out of 250. The people of Berne are among the most bitter enemies of Catholicism in Europe. Their fanaticism crushed the Sonderbund; but the recoil drove them towards infidelity, and hastened the decrease of devotion and of the influence of the clergy. None of the German Swiss, and few of the French, retain in its purity the system of Calvin. The unbelief of the clergy lays the Church open to the attacks of a Cæsaro-papistic democracy. A Swiss Protestant divine said recently: "Only a Church with a Catholic organisation could have maintained itself without a most extraordinary descent of the Holy Spirit against the assaults of Rationalism." "What we want," says another, "in order to have a free Church, is pastors and flocks; dogs and wolves there are in plenty."

In America it is rare to find people who are openly irreligious. Except some of the Germans, all Protestants generally admit the truth of Christianity and the authority of Scripture. But above half of the American population belongs to no particular sect, and performs no religious functions. This is the result of the voluntary principle, of the dominion of the sects, and of the absence of an established Church, to receive each individual from his birth, to adopt him by baptism, and to bring him up in the atmosphere of a religious life. The majority of men will naturally take refuge in indifference and neutrality from the conflict of opinions, and will persuade themselves that where there are so many competitors, none can be the lawful spouse. Yet there is a blessing on everything that is Christian, which can never be entirely effaced or converted into a curse. Whatever the imperfections of the form in which it exists, the errors mixed up with it, or the degrading influence of human passion, Christianity never ceases to work immeasurable social good. But the great theological characteristic of American Protestantism is the absence of the notion of the Church. The prevailing belief is, that in times past there was always a war of opinions and of parties, that there never was one unbroken vessel, and that it is necessary, therefore, to put up with fragments, one of which is nearly as good as another. Sectarianism, it is vaguely supposed, is the normal condition of religion. Now a sect is, by its very nature, instinctively adverse to a scientific theology; it feels that it is short-lived, without a history, and unconnected with the main stream of ecclesiastical progress, and it is inspired with hatred and with contempt for the past, for its teaching and its writings. Practically, sectaries hold that a tradition is the more surely to be rejected the older it is, and the more valuable in proportion to the lateness of its origin. As a consequence of the want of roots in the past, and of the thirst for novelty, the history of those sects which are not sunk in lethargy consists in sudden transitions to opposite extremes. In the religious world ill weeds grow apace; and those communities which strike root, spring up, and extend most rapidly are the least durable and the least respectable. The sects of Europe were transplanted into America: but there the impatience of authority, which is the basis of social and political life, has produced in religion a variety and a multiplicity, of Which Europe has no experience.

Whilst these are the fruits of religious liberty and ecclesiastical independence among a people generally educated, the Danish monarchy exhibits unity of faith strictly maintained by keeping the people under the absolute control of the upper class, on whose behalf the Reformation was introduced, and in a state of ignorance corresponding to their oppression. Care was taken that they should not obtain religious instruction, and in the beginning of the eighteenth century the celebrated Bishop Pontoppidan says, "an almost heathen blindness pervades the land." About the same time the Norwegian prelates declared, in a petition to the King of Denmark: "If we except a few children of God, there is only this difference between us and our heathen ancestors, that we bear the name of Christians." The Danish Church has given no signs of life, and has shown no desire for independence since the Reformation; and in return for this submissiveness, the Government suppressed every tendency towards dissent. Things were not altered when the tyranny of the nobles gave way to the tyranny of the crown; but when the revolution of 1848 had given the State a democratic basis, its confessional character was abrogated, and whilst Lutheranism was declared the national religion, conformity was no longer exacted. The king is still the head of the Church, and is the only man in Denmark who must be a Lutheran. No form of ecclesiastical government suitable to the new order of things has yet been devised, and the majority prefer to remain in the present provisional state, subject to the will of a Parliament, not one member of which need belong to the Church which it governs. Among the clergy, those who are not Rationalists follow the lead of Grundtvig. During many years this able man has conducted an incessant resistance against the progress of unbelief and of the German influence, and against the Lutheran system, the royal supremacy, and the parochial constitution. Not unlike the Tractarians, he desires the liberty of establishing a system which shall exclude Lutheranism, Rationalism, and Erastianism; and he has united in his school nearly all who profess positive Christianity in Denmark. In Copenhagen, out of 150,000 inhabitants, only 6000 go regularly to church. In Altona, there is but one church for 45,000 people. In Schleswig the churches are few and empty. "The great evil," says a Schleswig divine, "is not the oppression which falls on the German tongue, but the irreligion and consequent demoralisation which Denmark has imported into Schleswig. A moral and religious tone is the exception, not the rule, among the Danish clergy."

The theological literature of Sweden consists almost entirely of translations from the German. The clergy, by renouncing study, have escaped Rationalism, and remain faithful to the Lutheran system. The king is supreme in spirituals, and the Diet discusses and determines religious questions. The clergy, as one of the estates, has great political influence, but no ecclesiastical independence. No other Protestant clergy possesses equal privileges or less freedom. It is usual for the minister after the sermon to read out a number of trivial local announcements, sometimes half an hour long; and in a late Assembly the majority of the bishops pronounced in favour of retaining this custom, as none but old women and children would come to church for the service alone.