To win the truth—to lead a god-like life—to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction. Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for—worth dying for; if it be so,
the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St. Paul’s have made a terrible mistake—a mistake which the friends of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.
THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.
‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,—‘if I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary; Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him of the Professor’s Chair.
The real difficulty—which Sterling deemed invincible—which has proved too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it. The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot’s wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service—to the law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai’s sacred head. It looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,
‘Somewhere underneath the sun,
Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.’
It made no provision for the growth of man’s free and unfettered thought. Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale, divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence.
It is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well. The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities. Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to it, and fewer still have done so and lived.
But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself. You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church’s truth, if you take the Church’s pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living, you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their
stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain a position.