Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

Again, we hear—or we used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present—much about 'the right of private judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion, the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony with common sense and common subjects have not been the least successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of its purpose.

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.

But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of evil—drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can—only in doing so, society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober; and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do, but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,' thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament to public opinion—when he lays down as a general principle that the free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful an office for us.

Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan, it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to test their value, make their way into general reception.

A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and, partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted, for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.

It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous—if a war was unmistakably wicked—honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman. The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise—that he will continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his engagement.

It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of 1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If they had, they would have provided means by which he could have abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt—never to allow his mind to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament, precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of a Council.

If a clergyman—in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science with the established formulas—puts forward his perplexities; if he ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.

So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said—and said by men who had no professional antipathy to them—that the writers had broken their faith. Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine, physicians may have nothing to say to it.

These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and noblest in their lives and actions.