Christian Sects in the Nineteenth Century

by Caroline Frances Cornwallis

Observe, I do not here deny that many may profess a religion of sense, and remain spiritually-minded themselves: Heathenism had its Socrates, its Xenocrates, &c.—Romanism has its Pascal, its Fenelon, and a train of other great names: but look at the people during that period, and the account will be very different. When an ignorant man imagines that he can remove the Divine anger by a sacrifice or a penance, he avoids the trouble of curbing his passions, and compounds, as he thinks, for indulgence of the one, by the performance of the other; but when he is told that purity of life and thought is the only road to Divine favour, if he sins, he sins at least with some feelings of compunction, some dread that he may not have it in his power to remove the stain he is incurring. The preaching of Wesley reformed multitudes, all enthusiastic as it was; but it would be difficult to find a parallel in the annals of Romanism. As great a movement of the public mind was made by the preaching of Peter the Hermit; but how different was the object and the result! The personal pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, as a mode of wiping out sin, was undertaken by thousands, who perished miserably, or, if they lived, came back not better men than they went: under a system of less tangibility, and a preaching as effective, they might have staid in their homes, and glorified God by a life such as Christ came to teach and to exemplify.

It is so much easier to make a pilgrimage, or endure a long fast, than to subdue and tame the animal nature till it becomes obedient to the rational will, and seconds instead of resisting its wishes, that it is not surprising that in all ages a religion of outward observance should be more popular than one of inward purification. Those even which set off with the highest pretensions in this way have degenerated, and the outward and visible form is too often substituted for the inward and spiritual grace, which it was intended to represent not to supersede. That religion therefore has the best chance of influencing the soul, which, as far as is possible, renounces outward demonstrations which human indolence is so glad to rely on, and preaches boldly and effectually the uselessness of ceremonies, farther than as they tend to preserve the remembrance of Him who came to call the world back to Himself, to trample on the sensual and the animal, and to raise man to his pristine, or rather, to what is to be his future state. A public acknowledgment of Christ as our Master and Lord, and a compliance with his own few and simple ordinances; are all that Christian duty requires, and nearly as much as Christian prudence will permit. The rest is a matter of worldly expediency, and should be so regarded.

No doubt rests on my own mind—I leave others to think as they may—that Episcopacy was the established form of the Church as soon as the Christian communities began to assume enough of regularity to admit of any settled order; and I think it a wise form. As far as any institution can, it secures unity and decency in the church: and as far as any institution can, that was not positively established by Christ himself, it possesses, in my mind, the sanction of antiquity. It gives the concentration of purpose and regularity of effort which is bestowed by the discipline of an army; for as in an army a detachment acts upon the same system of tactics, and obeys officers constituted by the same authority, and thus assists the efforts of the main body, and falls into rank with it when they meet; so the church, under such a form, may send detachments to the ends of the earth, who may meet after long years, as brothers of the same communion, and find that though the individuals have passed away, others have stepped into their place in the ranks, and are teaching what their predecessors taught. The benefit of church discipline, therefore, in my mind is great; but I do not suppose that salvation depends on it, because God has repeatedly declared that Christ died for all, [135a] and that he is not willing that any should perish; [135b] consequently he can hardly have made our eternal state dependent on what no man can accomplish for himself. A person may not have it in his power to receive baptism from an ordained priest, but he may live as Christ taught; or, having never heard of Christ even, he may, like the gentiles, win glory and immortality, [135c] if, having not the law, he be a law unto himself. I would not receive Christ’s ordinances from the hands of any but an ordained priest, myself, because if a doubt exist in my mind, I sin in doing the doubtful thing; but herein I speak only for myself; let every man do as he is “persuaded in his mind” [136] in matters of secondary import, as all ceremonial matters must be.

You will now be prepared for my opinion with regard to the late movement made in the church by the Anglo-Catholics, as they term themselves; Puseyites, or Newmanites, as they have been termed by others. They have been thought to have introduced innovations—they have not:—there is not one of the ceremonies or practices which they have recommended, which was not very early practised in the church; but it was from the undue importance attached to these ceremonies, which came to be regarded with reverence from having been instituted by apostles and martyrs, that the after growth of Roman superstition sprang up so rankly. I believe the first promoters of this movement were as remote from actual Romanism as I am, when they first began it; but when once reason is submitted to any human dictum, in matters of religion, there is no resting place till we arrive at the “infallible” guide which the Romish church claims to be. There alone can the soul which will not think for itself, find a ready and confident director. Accordingly, we find that some of those very men who but a few years back exposed the errors of Romanism, have now yielded themselves blindfold to the guidance of that very church, which, as long as they allowed themselves to reason, they acknowledged to have departed from the truth. Yet it is perhaps fortunate for the people generally, that this declension of its pastors has been as rapid and complete as it has been:—they were going back towards the sin of Aaron—they were insisting on ceremonies as necessary to salvation, thus rendering religion gross and tangible, and the people thus taught would soon have forgotten what those ceremonies were intended to represent, and have depended for salvation on what could not avail them in the hour of need: for the repetition of prayer is not necessarily praying, nor is the reception of the eucharist necessarily sanctification, though these may be the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual grace which is working in the heart. Once teach a man that any ceremony is requisite to salvation, and he will soon go a step further by himself, and think the outward ceremony sufficient without the inward grace. This indeed is but a necessary corollary; for if the ceremony be requisite to salvation, then the inward grace working purity of life, avails not without the ceremony; and thus purity of life is no longer a substantive virtue; it cannot stand alone; and the prop which it requires being so very strong, why should not the prop itself be all in all? This will be the course of ratiocination in the mind of the mass of mankind, whether avowed or not; and however the promoters of a ceremonial religion may shrink from such a consequence, it is so certain, as all experience shows, that they might as well throw a man who cannot swim into the water, and recommend him not to drown, as give a half instructed man a ceremony, which he is told is requisite to salvation, and expect that he will not cling to that, as the more convenient and least difficult observance; and whilst perfect in complying with every ordinance of the church, forget that he has overlooked the weightier matters of the law—judgment, justice, and mercy.

This may sound harsh, but it is true; and I appeal to the calm judgment even of the excellent Dr. Pusey himself, who has so unintentionally drawn many into a course from which, haply, he would now gladly draw them back, whether it be not so? His learning will show him how, through all ages, the spiritualism taught from heaven, has been counteracted by the visible and the tangible contrived by man; and in the step from the patriarchal religion, to the idolatry of Greece and Rome; from Christianity as preached by Christ and his Apostles, to the gross superstitions of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, he may see a type of what would be the consequence of again enforcing a ceremonial religion.

APPENDIX.

The following are extracts from the “Christianæ Religionis Institutio,” of Faustus Socinus:

Q. Quid igitur de Dei natura, sive essentia, nosse omnino nos debere statuis?

R. Hæc duo in summa. Quod sit et quod unus tantum sit.