My friends, those are questions which have been asked often enough in the world’s history, by vast masses at once. And they may be answered in more ways than one.
They may be answered as the weavers of a certain country (thank God, not England) answered them in the potato famine with their mad song, ‘We looked to the earth, and the earth deceived us. We looked to the kings, and the kings deceived us. We looked to God, and God deceived us. Let us lie down and die.’
Or they may answer them—they will be more likely to answer them in England just now, because there are those who will teach them so to answer—in another, but a scarcely less terrible tone. ‘Yes, there is a God; and he is angry with us. And why? Because there is something, or some one, in the nation which he abhors—heretics, papists’—what not—any man, or class of men, on whom cowardly and terrified ignorance may happen to fix as a scapegoat, and cry, ‘These are the guilty! We have allowed these men, indulged them; the accursed thing is among us, therefore the face of the Lord is turned from us. We will serve him truly henceforth—and hate those whom he hates. We will be orthodox henceforth—and prove our orthodoxy by persecuting the heretic.’
Does this seem to you extravagant, impossible? Remember, my friends, that within the last century Lord George Gordon’s riots convulsed London. Can you give me any reason why Lord George Gordon’s riots cannot occur again? Believe me, the more you study history, the more you study human nature, the more possible it will seem to you. It is not, I believe, infidelity, but fanaticism, which England has to fear just now. The infidelity of England is one of mere doubt and denial, a scepticism; which is in itself weak and self-destructive. The infidelity of France in 1793 was strong enough, but just because it was no scepticism, but a faith; a positive creed concerning human reason, and the rights of man, which men could formulize, and believe in, and fight for, and persecute for, and, if need was, die for. But no such exists in England now. And what we have most to fear in England under the pressure of some sudden distress, is a superstitious panic, and the wickedness which is certain to accompany that panic; mean and unjust, cruel and abominable things, done in the name of orthodoxy: though meanwhile, whether what the masses and their spiritual demagogues will mean by orthodoxy, will be the same that we and the Church of England mean thereby, is a question which I leave for your most solemn consideration. That, however, rather than any proclamation of the abstract rights of man, or installations of a goddess of Reason, is the form which spiritual hunger is most likely to take in England now. Alas! are there not tokens enough around us now, whereby we may discern the signs of this time?
I say, the spiritual hunger will reawaken; and woe to us who really understand and love the Church of England; woe to us who are really true to her principles, honestly subscribe her formulas, if we cannot appease it in that day.
But wherewith? We may look, my friends, appalled at the danger and the need. We may cry to our Lord, ‘From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread in the wilderness?’ But his answer will be, as far as I dare to predict it, the same as to his apostles of old on another and a similar occasion, ‘Give ye them to eat. They need not depart.’
I am not going to draw any far-fetched analogy between the miracle recorded in the gospel, and the subject on which I am speaking. I am not going to put any mystical and mediæval interpretation on the seven loaves, or the two small fishes. I only ask you to accept the plain moral practical lesson which the words convey.—
Use the means which you have already, however few and weak they seem. If Christ be among you, as he is indeed, he will bless them, and multiply them you know not how.
Use the means which you have; though they may seem to you inadequate, though they may seem to the world antiquated, and decrepit, try them. They need not depart from us, these masses, to seek spiritual food, they know not where, if we have but faith. Let us give them what we have; the organization of the Church of England, and the teaching of the Church of England.
The organization of the Church. Not merely its Parochial system, but its Diocesan system. In London, more than in any part of England, the Diocesan system is valuable. A London parish is not like a country one, a self-dependent, corporate body, made up of residents of every rank, capable of providing for the physical and spiritual wants of its own stationary population. In London, population fluctuates rapidly, sometimes rolling away from one quarter, always developing itself in fresh quarters; in London all ranks do not dwell side by side within sight and sound of each other: but the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, dwell apart, work apart, and are but too often out of sight, out of mind. These, and many other reasons, make it impossible for the mere parochial system to bring out the zeal and the liberality of London Churchmen. If they are to realize their unity and their strength, they must do so not as members of a Parish, but of a Diocese; their Bishop must be to them the sign that they are one body; their good works must be organized more and more under him, and round him. This is no new theory of mine; it is a historic law. The Priest for the village, the Bishop for the city, has been the natural and necessary organization of the Church in every age; and it was in strict accordance with this historic law, that the London Diocesan Board of Education was founded in 1846, not to override the parochial system, but to do for it what it cannot, in a great city, do for itself; to establish elementary schools (and now I am happy to say, evening schools also) in parishes which were too poor to furnish them for themselves. I, as the son of a London Rector, can bear my testimony to the excellent working of that Board; and it is with grief I hear that, in spite of the vast work which it has done since 1846, and which it is still doing, on an income which is now not £300 a year—proving thereby how cheaply and easily your work may be done when it is done in the right way—it is with grief, I say, that I hear that it is more and more neglected by the religious public.